Move over, Barbenheimer—Glicked is upon us. Please secure an AR-enabled Gladiator arena popcorn bucket, or perhaps one shaped like a lantern for Wicked, to celebrate.
That’s the habit that theater chains are trying to get movie fans accustomed to each time a major release rolls around.
Since the pandemic upended the moviegoing business, theaters have gotten more creative with their offerings in an effort to entice ticket buyers. Accompanying upgraded seats and fancier food is a perhaps unexpected star: the specialty popcorn bucket, usually a themed, over-the-top receptacle to hold the iconic movie snack. The novelty item, which has been offered for titles like Alien: Romulus, Mean Girls, and Despicable Me 4, is aimed at building out the cinema experience to create an emotional memory to encourage customers to return to the theater, according to Wanda Gierhart Fearing, chief content and marketing officer at Cinemark.
“We wanted our customers to have something that they could take home…after the movie that would just bring that memory back,” Gierhart Fearing told Marketing Brew. “[So] the next time they look at it in their home, they think, ‘Oh, the movies. I had such a great time.’ And then it drives this virtuous cycle.”
From boring to beefed-up buckets
When Dune: Part Two hit theaters in March 2024, a provocative novelty bucket in the sphincter-like shape of a sandworm caught the internet’s attention, and it seemed a new phenomenon had been born. But novelty buckets have existed—and been sold with varying degrees of success—since before the suggestive sandworm took center stage, according to Rod Mason, VP of business development at Zinc Group, which has created popcorn buckets for titles like Dune: Part Two, Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, and The Super Mario Bros. Movie.
According to Mason, Zinc began creating branded popcorn buckets in Australia in 2012 and opened its US office in 2016, but the unique snack vessels weren’t an immediate stateside success. “There was a fair bit of pushback; the main objection [was] they don’t fit in the drink holder,” he told us.
Mason credits the theater chain AMC with the current bucket craze after it took a gamble in 2019 on specially designed R2-D2 popcorn buckets from Zinc to coincide with the release of Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker. The theater chain “did a very significant number of these” buckets, Mason said.
Barry Brakeville, AMC’s director of corporate communication, said in an email that the movie-theater chain “didn’t know for sure if moviegoers would really want them.” But they did: “As it turns out,” he said, “the R2-D2 vessels sold out at AMC locations around the country on opening night.” (AMC declined to share exactly how many were sold.)
Since then, Brakeville said, AMC has worked to make standout snack vessels part of the theater chain’s long-term product strategy, with a focus on being “new, different, unique, must-have and super cool.”
Like many businesses tied to the movies, the pandemic slowed the popcorn-bucket business down, and theaters only started ramping up their popcorn-bucket offerings once there was renewed interest in coming back to the theater, Mason said. After the Dune: Part Two bucket took off on social media, he said, Zinc received “a tidal wave” of interest.
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Part of the appeal of a novelty popcorn bucket, at least in the case of Dune: Part Two, was the fact that its distinct design quickly took on a life of its own, inspiring everything from memes about NSFW alternative uses for the bucket to an SNL sketch immortalizing its impact. Mason even recalled being told a story about an AMC consumer who bought 75 buckets at once, presumably to participate in a resale market that’s asked for as much as $805 for the limited-edition sandworm.
Executives at theater chains also credit social media for the popcorn bucket’s popularity. “We work with the studios now because the studios have seen on social media…how excited everyone’s getting about it,” Gierhart Fearing said. “So now when you talk to those presidents of marketing and all the studios, they’re looking at movie merchandise as another beat.”
Buttered-up returns
As both theater and customer demand for popcorn buckets grow, it’s opening up another stream of revenue to theaters, according to Gierhart Fearing.
Moana 2, which is being released later this month, features several exclusive popcorn buckets at major US theater chains. The Cinemark bucket is designed to look like a roaring wave, with figurines of Moana, Heihei, Maui’s fishhook, and Pua flanking the perimeter.
“We had The Rock and some other talents from Moana post about, ‘Here’s the Cinemark-exclusive bucket,’ Gierhart Fearing said, “and literally, we have 275,000 views just on Instagram.”
Popcorn buckets have been so popular that Cinemark has begun selling the buckets, as well as other movie-related merchandise on a dedicated e-commerce website to better meet demand, Gierhart Fearing told us. “It’s starting to be a business driver,” she said.
Beyond sales of snack receptacles themselves, she said it could also help drive further interest in the movies overall.
Customers are “starting to remember experiences,” Gierhart Fearing said. “It’s much better than sitting at home and watching a movie on your small screen. You’re going to come in and have a full, engaging experience and get to take a little piece of it home after you’re done.”
The pressure to outdo
As specialty popcorn buckets grow in popularity, it’s presenting a new challenge for designers: The more attention the containers garner, the more pressure designers feel to outdo the previous iteration, Zinc’s global creative director, Marcus Gonzalez, told Marketing Brew.
“The challenge is to come up with as many ideas of the bespoke stuff, the custom stuff, as possible,” Gonzalez said, adding that Zinc may develop up to 50 different ideas for a single project. “You don’t necessarily want to repeat your hits as much as possible.”
But when a bucket takes off, it can really take off—which has allowed theaters and designers to work with more price elasticity when creating and selling the buckets, Mason told us.
“If we make something that’s cool enough,” he said, “people will buy it.”