Tom Cruise cares deeply about your popcorn bucket. The actor is famously obsessed with facilitating the optimal moviegoing experience. So, of course, for the final installment of his long-running Mission: Impossible franchise, he is embracing the breakout movie theater trend that asks audiences to stick their hands inside some outlandish orifices to retrieve their snack. According to Rob Bennett, the director of food and beverage product strategy at AMC, Cruise helped to guide the design of the theater chain’s bucket, which will debut alongside Mission: Impossible—The Final Reckoning next May. Bennett is not giving anything away. “But we nailed it,” he says gleefully.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]Cruise is not the only A-lister offering aesthetic advice on these buckets that cost anywhere from $20 to $65 a pop. Bennett says that Tim Burton weighed in on the design process to ensure that the cup for Beetlejuice Beetlejuice aligned with his singular aesthetic. (It’s topped with a shriveled head.) The notoriously meticulous James Cameron has “final approval” on the Avatar popcorn bucket, which will be timed to the release of the third movie in that franchise next December. “I like that the filmmakers are passionate about it,” Bennett says.
Suddenly, every aspiring blockbuster has its own novelty bucket. Theater chains are dreaming up more and more whimsical—and, in some cases, distracting—contraptions in hopes of capturing attention. Regal’s Inside Out 2 bucket, modeled on the character of Anger, lights up, an interesting choice given that it’s designed for use in dark theaters. AMC’s popcorn holder for December’s animated Lord of the Rings movie, War of the Rohirrim, doubles as a hammer that a moviegoer might use to bop a chatty neighbor on the head.
The viral popcorn bucket has become a shining beacon of hope for the theatergoing experience in an otherwise underwhelming year at the movies. The pandemic drove people inside, and the concurrent rise of streaming services kept them there. Then last year’s actors’ and writers’ strikes delayed films originally slated for 2024. This summer’s box office slipped 10% compared to last year, when Barbenheimer ruled theaters. And yet every month or so, moviegoers take to social media to extol the virtues of or poke fun at some new popcorn receptacle.
AMC says that in 2018 its revenue from collectible concession vessels, or CCVs for short, was $0. Last year, it was $54 million. Though AMC has not yet announced its year-end earnings, its popcorn bucket sales are expected to skyrocket again now that the Wicked and Gladiator II containers have become available. $54 million is a drop in the bucket as a share of the $4.8 billion that AMC made globally across all its sectors last year. Still, it’s nice to have.
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And the theater chains believe Instagrammable items like outlandish popcorn buckets can coax audiences off their couches and into cinemas to boost the box office—even if the buckets themselves are not earning enough to save them from existential crisis.
“The year the war of the popcorn buckets began”
The novelty popcorn bucket isn’t technically new. Theme parks, particularly Disney’s, have been selling something similar at least since the early ’90s. But movie theaters only began adopting the strategy in earnest in 2019, with the release of AMC’s R2-D2 popcorn bucket when The Rise of Skywalker hit theaters. “AMC Theaters CEO Adam Aron has been at the forefront of trying new things like this to get customers in the door,” says Eric Wold, a movie theater analyst at B. Riley.
CCVs aren’t just cardboard bowls with pictures on the side; they must be 3-D molded. The R2-D2, which looked remarkably like the amiable Star Wars robot, sold out at $50 per vessel. But then the pandemic hit and any major bucket schemes were delayed. It wasn’t until last summer that theaters rediscovered their potential.
“I won’t say we were the only game, but we were driving a lot of these,” says Bennett of AMC. “In the last 18 months our competition has really blown up.” Regal confirmed that it did not push its novelty buckets in earnest until 2023 when a certain blonde doll made her big-screen debut.
“To be 100% honest, it was Barbie,” says Matt Willard, head of business development at Regal Cinemas. Even the most casual moviegoer probably recalls last year’s onslaught of Barbie merchandise, from rugs to frozen yogurt. What from the vast universe of Barbie paraphernalia would lend itself to a vessel for popcorn? “There was the convertible car, which unfortunately a rival had,” Willard says, referring to AMC’s bucket. “But we had the popcorn container that looks like the box that Barbie comes in with the clear front. It really opened our eyes to the potential of these items.”
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The turning point that elevated the status of the popcorn buckets might have been this past March, when director Denis Villeneuve reacted with shock to the admittedly suggestive AMC Dune: Part 2 receptacle. “When I saw it, I went, ‘Hoooooly smokes.’ What the [expletive]!?” he told the New York Times. That bucket, modeled on the movie’s earth-swallowing sandworms, went viral thanks in part to a Saturday Night Live sketch that involves, well, using the food container for purposes other than eating. “It was probably unintentional,” says Wold. Zinc Group, the makers of the buckets, have expressed total shock at the dirty jokes.
This summer, Ryan Reynolds hyped up the equally provocative Deadpool & Wolverine popcorn bucket (arguably a better fit for that movie’s raunchy tone) featuring Wolverine’s textured tongue by tweeting, “Years from now they will look back at 2024 as the year the War of the Popcorn Buckets began.”
Movie theater chains plot out their plans for themed buckets nearly a year in advance. Regal is currently working on containers for films that will not debut until Q4 of 2025. Theaters work with a few companies who license the rights to certain movies and design the buckets with input from both the theaters and the studios. Though studios do not get a cut of the bucket sales, they want the vessels to go viral. The theater chains used to reveal their designs just a few days before a movie’s premiere. Now, they compete to preview them on social media weeks in advance to drive record-breaking opening weekends, thereby boosting buzz. Says Wold, “I think you’re going to see a lot more risk-taking.”
The actual utility of these buckets is a matter of debate on the internet. Many fans have pointed out that it was hard to extract popcorn from the AMC Deadpool and Wolverine popcorn bucket even before the snacker rubs their hand against Wolverine’s discomfiting tongue. The AMC Barbie corvette didn’t do a particularly good job of holding in kernels. And the new Regal Gladiator II bucket includes a hingeing helmet that makes a rather loud noise when shut.
“We rank coolness over functionality kind of all the time,” says Bennett. “We really want to try and create the best souvenir for the fans.” He adds that most people bring them home still wrapped rather than using them for popcorn or soda.
While to some, the buckets may look like landfill, to fans they’re collectors’ items, a rapidly growing market. Those Dune buckets are reselling for $300 on eBay. The collectibles market as a whole was valued at $32.4 billion in 2023 by research firm Market Decipher. So-called “kidults,” adults who line their shelves with toys, gadgets, and collectibles, are a rapidly growing sector of the toy market. AMC attended San Diego Comic-Con for the first time this year to sell some of the containers. Fans display them at home alongside Funko Pops of Captain America and Direwolf stuffed animals.
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Getting butts in seats
Theaters make the vast majority of their money on concessions. When a moviegoer purchases a ticket, about half of that money goes to the studio, and the other half is retained by the exhibitor. After accounting for theater upkeep—electric bills, cleaning, rent, etc.—the margins are pretty poor.
But theaters can keep all the money they make on food and drinks. Wold estimates that margins on concessions average in the mid-80% range, and that basics like popcorn and soda tend to have a 95% margin. Though the novelty popcorn buckets are more expensive to produce than a regular paper bag, the profits still justify the expense. If the theater sells a $10 regular bucket of popcorn at a 95% margin, it makes $9.50. If the theater sells a $30 special popcorn bucket at a 75% margin, they make $22.50.
Plus, raising popcorn revenues is a better way for struggling theaters to boost the bottom line than raising ticket prices, which are shared with studios and may deter customers from coming altogether. Recent trends show that once a customer has committed to going to the movie—they’ve already bought their ticket, paid for babysitting and parking—they’re willing to shell out for the best experience possible. Ticket sales for larger premium formats like IMAX accounted for over 14% of all ticket sales as of the end of June 2024, according to a recent Wall Street Journal survey, a 4% increase over 2019. Wold says concessions are similarly thriving. “You want to do everything you can once the customer is in the door to get more out of their wallets that you don’t have to share with the studios.”
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Theaters are conscious not to overproduce popcorn buckets, and not just because scarcity creates a sense of desirability. “You don’t want to be left with any extra inventory because once that movie is out of the theater that stuff is going to be tough to sell,” says Wold.
AMC confirms that sales are largely limited to opening weekend. “Once we’re through that initial week, we see sales drop off, so we try to hit that perfect number,” says Bennett. “Our goal is to sell out Sunday afternoon.”
It’s difficult to quantify the degree to which buckets are drawing moviegoers back to theaters. “We can’t tangibly run a report showing this container boosted ticket sales,” says Willard. “But based on the amount of feedback we get through the customer service department asking when this or that container is coming out, I would think, yes, it is driving that customer to come to our theater.”
With little risk and high reward, these popcorn buckets are not going anywhere. “I’m not sure we’re going to be able to sustain the pace that we’re at right now, but I think that these are absolutely going to be part of the strategy moving forward,” says Bennett. “I would love to say the industry is coming back because of popcorn vessels, but we know this is part of a bigger picture.” Theaters have tried to lure theatergoers with all sorts of amenities like comfy recliners, alcoholic beverages, and gourmet concession options. Buckets are just the latest iteration.
It’s a truism of the movie theater business that moviegoing begets moviegoing. An audience member sees five trailers before the movie and returns to catch one of those flicks. He watches another five trailers and returns again, reaching for a fistful of popcorn from whatever maximalist memento Hollywood has dreamed up this time.
