It’s official: Spider-Man: Brand New Day‘s popcorn buckets are a success, despite one major problem. Theaters have always tried to make cinema trips an experience in their own right, and popcorn buckets have been a part of that for years. Personally, one of my most treasured is the popcorn bucket for Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, which featured stunning art based on the Battle of Scarif. That’s just a basic bucket, but it’s the art that sells it, and I’ll always love it. Modern popcorn buckets are much more creative; The Odyssey‘s Trojan Horse is genius.
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Marvel and Sony’s new Spider-Man: Brand New Day popcorn buckets are absolutely breathtaking, and the fans love them. The Holy Grail of these will undoubtedly be the web-shooter popcorn bucket, which simulates Spider-Man shooting his web. It’s being rapturously received by the fandom online.
There’s Just One Problem With This Spider-Man Popcorn Bucket
Themed popcorn buckets aren’t new, but one thing certainly is: popcorn buckets where the popcorn is basically a supplemental. Supergirl‘s popcorn bucket barely has any room for popcorn, and this web-shooter example is pretty similar; it’s the opposite of functional, with the design actively limiting the amount of popcorn you can get. That’s quite staggering, given it will surely be the most expensive and sought-after. Remarkably, online discussion doesn’t seem fazed by this at all, but instead embraces it.
There’s a reason. Fandoms have always had a strong “collector’s culture,” and this plays into it well. These popcorn buckets are perfect collectibles: scarcity – one of the main drivers of collectible value – is baked into the design.They’re only available for a limited period of time, tied to a specific event, and theaters tend to only have a limited amount of stock (I sadly wasn’t able to get a Mandalorian and Grogu AT-AT popcorn bucket, because I’d booked my ticket before they went up for sale, and they’d already sold out on opening day).
But hardcore fans don’t just buy collectibles because of price. A couple of weeks ago, a friend of mine went to see Masters of the Universe; he grew up with the franchise, and was more than a little nervous about Travis Knight’s adaptation. In the end, he loved it, and he couldn’t resist buying a Skeletor popcorn bucket as he left the theater. That collectible was a memento, a way of remembering the experience of watching a film he’d loved that meant so much to him. He didn’t actually care about the popcorn at all, and gave it away to another family who were heading in to watch the film.
My friend’s example may seem extreme, but it illustrates the real reason these popcorn buckets sell; fundamentally, they are collectible because they are part of an experience that has been, or is expected to be, loved. That’s the same reason there are few real complaints about Spider-Man: Brand New Day‘s web shooter popcorn bucket. This is one of the most eagerly anticipated films in Marvel history, slickly marketed, and Tom Holland has sold it as a labor of love. Expectations are high, and people are going in happily assuming they will want something to remember it by.
Theaters have always tried to market themselves as that kind of experience, and this is even more important in the post-COVID, post-streaming world. For the studios, these collectibles add another revenue stream to theatrical release, meaning box office isn’t quite as critical. Viewed from this perspective, it’s easy to see why popcorn buckets have become so spectacular, and why the popcorn itself isn’t really a core part of the deal anymore.
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