Last year, everyone was talking about the Frankenstein-esque mashup of "Barbie" and "Oppenheimer," dubbed "Barbenheimer." The two blockbusters were released on the same weekend and thousands of people ordered tickets, making the odd pair a double feature that created the highest grossing weekend at the box office in 2023.
Since then, there have been many film pairings that have tried to re-create the pop culture success of "Barbenheimer," but all these imitators have failed to enter our society's lexicon. In October the gore-filled horror flick "Saw X" and the kid-friendly animated "Paw Patrol" shared a weekend. Some were calling it "Saw Patrol." It was a cheap imitation, a not-so-reasonable facsimile, that didn't pull in anywhere near the numbers of "Barbenheimer." Where "Saw Patrol" failed, this year's latest cinematic meme succeeds in being a curiosity that has organically baffled everyone who has seen it.
Walking into the AMC Chenal 9 at the Promenade, I felt like Indiana Jones as I laid eyes on the latest cinematic icon to cause a social media stir. I walked to the concession stand, reached into my wallet and pulled out $25 for my very own "Dune" popcorn bucket.
For those of you who haven't seen the comedic glory of this popcorn bucket, let me describe it. The base is your traditional cylindrical tin popcorn bucket. Sprawled across it are the words "Dune: Part 2." It is adorned with golden symbols and iconography from the movie. The most peculiar thing about the bucket is a plastic topper that fixes itself snuggly to the lip of the tin. The topper is all shades of brown and gray, and it's shaped like sand, rock and earth with a very prominent sandworm protruding out of the center with its mouth agape to serve as an open orifice for hungry moviegoers to reach inside and access their buttery morsels. (For those of you who don't know what the Dune sandworm -- also known as a Shai-Hulud -- looks like, it is more or less a cross between the Sarlacc from "Return of the Jedi" and the sandworm from "Beetlejuice.")
There is an issue with this bucket's design. The tin is one of the most impractical ways to consume popcorn, and the worm's mouth, which has rubber tentacle-esque teeth, is barely large enough for me to fit my hand in. By the time my fist is full of popcorn, it has expanded to the point where I can't retrieve it from the mouth. I have to drop a few pieces to be able to un-trap myself. And as my hand exits the bucket, the rubber tentacle teeth knock any loosely held pieces of popcorn from out of my grip. In the end, I get maybe three or four pieces at a time. (I will say, there is one positive about the tight-lipped worm design. As I was driving home, I had the tin in my passenger's seat. I made a sharp turn and the bucket rolled onto the floorboard. Not a single kernel escaped the bucket.)
I found myself delving into a strange rabbit hole (or, in this case, wormhole) into an odd subculture of popcorn tin collectors. During the pandemic, to supplement the lack of ticket sales, theaters like AMC started producing these novelty popcorn tins. They've produced quite a few of them up to this point, and there are people out there who collect them. AMC had a toy Barbie car that also doubled as a popcorn holder. They've had buckets from "Wonka" and Disney's "Wish" to "Ant-Man," where you can eat your popcorn from the hero's helmet.
People go crazy for popcorn tins. I checked eBay and saw that Dune buckets were being listed at $50-$60, which means that I could theoretically flip my bucket and make a profit. Popcorn tins date all the way to the 1960s, and slowly have become one of the more popular Christmas gifts for shoppers who are too lazy or noncommittal. You can find pretty much any type of themed tin online. I remember my aunt had a slew of carousel-themed popcorn tins decorating the nooks and crannies of her house. Of course the popcorn in her buckets was long gone, and they're now filled with knickknacks and serve as mini storage units.
The Dune popcorn bucket has been so popular that AMC has already announced its next bucket. By the end of the month, you'll be able to buy a "Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire" tin shaped like the rectangular ghost traps from the film. The design for that one is more practical and less crude, but it still looks cool nonetheless. I doubt I'll ever be a tin collector, but I do know that I'll be displaying my Dune popcorn bucket on my mantel for all to see.