The unexpected rise of the specialty popcorn bucket

Deadpool & Wolverine is breaking records at the box office, but it’s not just the new movie that fans are looking forward to — it’s the specialized popcorn bucket modeled after Wolverine’s mask with a wide, circular opening at its mouth and a textured tongue that grazes wrists.

This isn’t the first time theatergoers have been asked to work a little harder to get their hands on some popcorn. Movie theaters first began selling these “elevated concession vessels” in December 2019 with a container modeled after the droid R2-D2 for the release of the movie Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker. It holds a drink at the top and popcorn in the middle.

“We started it,” Rod Mason, the vice president of business development at Zinc Group, told Yahoo Entertainment. The company dreams up and creates specialty popcorn buckets and sells them to theaters, but they’ve been creating specialized merch for theme parks and other companies for years. The specialized popcorn bucket has been “around forever.”

Mason said the company was at first afraid that the R2-D2 product would be too expensive, but AMC Theatres bought a bunch of them just to see what would happen. They sold out within 48 hours at about $50 apiece.

“Everyone wants to do a popcorn bucket,” he said. “We’ve had inquiries from ice hockey teams to television series ... anything you can think of.”

When theaters temporarily limited their audiences in 2020 during COVID-19 lockdown and many highly anticipated movie release dates were pushed back, production of popcorn buckets also took a hit. Hank Green, the senior vice president of food and beverage at AMC, told Yahoo Entertainment that the pause in sales helped them consider just how much of a success story the bucket was and consider how they could replicate that success in the future.

“The guests that are fans are real fans, and they want to get their hands on something,” Green said. “The movie theater business has been around 100-plus years ... and now we have this new, cool thing to latch on to and get excited about.”

How popcorn buckets went viral

By February 2024, the buckets were back and more viral than ever with the release of the Dune: Part Two popcorn bucket, which came before the sequel’s release. At $25, half the price of the Rise of Skywalker bucket, it sold out during the movie’s March 1 opening weekend. Its main selling point, though, seems to be the lid modeled after the mouth of the series’ infamous worms breaking through the sandy ground. It reached a unique level of infamy because of jokes about its resemblance to a sex toy.

Hype and humor about the Dune buckets reached its peak after a Feb. 3 Saturday Night Live sketch about a teenager (Marcello Hernández) imagining a romantic night at home with his.

The writers behind the sketch, Steven Castillo and Dan Bulla, told Yahoo Entertainment in an email that seeing images of the bucket online made them think they could write a beautiful “teenage love song” about it.

“We had only seen pictures of it until we got to the set and saw the actual bucket, and we were in shock over how gnarly it was,” Castillo said. “I kept getting my hand stuck in it.”

It was so popular, Dune cast members had to respond to questions about it as they promoted the film. In a May interview with Variety, AMC CEO Adam Aron said he wasn’t totally impressed with the SNL parody.

Green didn’t mind joking about it.

“It was designed to be like a sandworm from the amazing work of Frank Herbert in the Dune series, so yes, it was designed to be like that in the [form of director] Denis Villeneuve’s visual display,” he told Yahoo Entertainment. “What other people did with the design ... that’s out of our control.”

How popcorn buckets get made

Marcus Gonzalez, the creative director at Zinc, comes up with the ideas for the popcorn buckets with his team. They collaborate with the company’s sales and product development teams to make sure they’re on track, then the company presents their ideas to licensing sources, from film studios to intellectual property owners, to see what sticks. The process involves a lot of collaboration.

“Part of the challenge [for the Dune bucket] was trying to figure out what’s going to be eye-catching and what people will want to take home,” he said. “You have to understand that fans know what all this stuff is. They might love Oscar Isaac or whoever else is in the movie, but ... they also want something that’s iconic. With Dune, the most iconic thing is the worm.”

Gonzalez said the team considered modeling the bucket off some other items from the film, including the “pain box” that Timothée Chalamet’s character puts his hand in and the “thumper” device that summons the sandworms. He credits the team’s art director with coming up with the idea to have people stick their hands in the worm’s mouth.

Mason said they start working on the ideas for popcorn buckets 12 to 15 months ahead of the movie’s release. They submitted an idea for the Deadpool & Wolverine concept in June 2023. The Dune bucket was manufactured in July 2023.

“Somebody got ahold of [the Dune bucket] in January and all hell broke loose,” Mason joked. “When the Dune bucket came out — I don’t know Ryan Reynolds, but apparently he made a statement that he wanted to have his bucket be as viral and exciting as the Dune one ... they had already purchased a Deadpool concept, but they had to scratch that and go back into production.”

The Dune bucket is, by all accounts, not intended to be suggestive — but the Deadpool & Wolverine one is. Reynolds shared a video on X in May to announce the bucket, which features Deadpool’s gloved hand stroking the bucket, modeled after Wolverine’s face, before a stream of melted butter runs down its popcorn-filled “face.”

In the post, Reynolds declared 2024 the year that the “War of the Popcorn Buckets began.” The buckets cost $25 each, but after the movie’s first, record-breaking weekend in theaters, they’re already sold out.

What’s next for popcorn buckets

Mason said the goal for theaters is to sell out their supply of buckets within a film’s opening weekend. They work with the “big three” studios in the United States — Regal, AMC and Cinemark. Sometimes different theaters offer different collectibles for the same movies. For instance, Cinemark’s Deadpool & Wolverine popcorn bucket has an opening at the top of its head instead of its mouth, making it considerably less suggestive.

AMC’s Green said that ultimately, buying a popcorn bucket on opening weekend is just another way of celebrating moviegoing.

“It’s a nostalgic thing for so many people,” he said. “There are a lot of memories tied to it, but not a lot of physical things to bring that memory to life. Now, I can go see Deadpool, then have the visual representation of that sitting on my shelf.”

Must-see movies and social media buzz are convincing people to leave their homes to partake in theatrical events, and specialty popcorn buckets are giving people things they can hold on to after.

The buckets aren’t just a selling point for theaters either — they’re a huge trend with enormous resale value.

According to data that eBay shared with Yahoo Entertainment, the words “popcorn bucket” were searched more than 4,500 times per day in February 2024. The Dune bucket was announced on Jan. 24 and became available for purchase during the weekend of March 1. As of July, some are still listed for resale, with prices ranging from $80 to $800.

As more movies like Despicable Me 4 and Inside Out 2 announced specialty popcorn buckets, people searched for popcorn buckets over 5,700 times per day in June 2024 — and the Deadpool & Wolverine bucket wasn’t even available until late July.

Gonzalez and Mason are keeping Zinc’s plans for future popcorn buckets under wraps, but they’re looking forward to the one tied to Alien: Romulus that is modeled after the unsettling Xenomorph’s head.

The future of the novelty popcorn bucket is now in the hands of fans, and their happiness was the goal all along.