It seems like every movie now has a collectable popcorn bucket to go with it. Working at a movie theatre, I’ve seen some really cool ones and some that felt like flops this year. Here are some of my favorite and least favorite.
In my opinion we started the year off strong with the Burn Book from the Mean Girls movie that released Jan.12, 2024. I love this popcorn bucket. I think it’s super creative. I like the book themed popcorn buckets. There was another one released for Beetlejuice Beetlejuice that mirrored the handbook for the recently deceased, which I also really like. I think they look cool and I think this one was relevant and cute!
One of the best ones this year was the Batman bucket that was released with the return of the batman movies to AMC. It is a working Bat signal. It lights up and is moveable. It casts a bat shaped shadow on the wall. I think that it’s one of the coolest ones released this year. Another one that was also super cool was the Ghostbusters popcorn bucket that was a ghost trap. It lit up and made noise and looked very screen accurate!
The Borderlands movie got a Claptrap popcorn bucket released with it. It had little arms with it that were poseable and it had a working light that simulated a camera on the front of it. I like the creativity of this one, and I think it was cute. The downside was that it broke very easily
One I hated was the Dune: Part Two popcorn bucket. This popcorn bucket was the bane of my existence for weeks as a movie. I had people come up and ask for it while making inappropriate jokes and comments. Plus I think it was overall a kind of boring popcorn bucket. The only interesting part was the sandworm part. The bucket itself is boring looking. On the good side of the Dune bucket we got the Deadpool & Wolverine popcorn bucket which was a play on the Dune bucket and I think fit very well with the theming for the movie.
A lot of the buckets that are released now are tins with a wrap on them for whatever movie you are seeing, and I think they can be cool but they are boring. Some of the best tins have been the Glinda bucket that went with Wicked, the facehugger tin for Alien, and the Gladiator II bucket that is shaped like the colosseum. Some of the worst in my opinion were the Universal Monsters tin, which was just a printed tin, the Moana 2 tin, and the Red One tin. They are all the same looking and boring. Some of them are cute but overall they are boring.
This December I think we are getting two of the coolest buckets of the year with the Sonic The Hedgehog 3 bucket being a Sonic head that mirrors the Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse movie buckets and the Nosferatu bucket, which is a coffin with some really cool details. The bucket has pictures of rats on the inside and has some very interesting details on the outside. I’m excited to see these ones being released. So if you are a bucket collector, keep an eye out for these buckets and whatever 2025 has in store for popcorn bucket collectors!