I love cinema.
I have loved cinema ever since I was a child and saw the Pokémon film at the cinema. Then Godzilla. Then the first Harry Potter.
But I am (also, and above all) a popcorn fan. It’s a food I eat constantly, so much so that for a while plenty of people called me just that.
It might seem obvious, but in the end, all things considered, it is not: cinema is popcorn and popcorn is cinema. No other food is so radically tied to the place where it is eaten, or to the art it supports.
That is also why it is a pleasure to witness the revival of buckets, that is, popcorn tubs, which have lately become the object of a genuine collective craze. So much so that linking buckets to TCGs is no longer all that absurd.
To put it in perspective: when IMAX produced the film-camera bucket for Nolan’s The Odyssey, it printed only 2,500 units. They sold out IMMEDIATELY. CEO Rich Gelfond was therefore forced to personally call the head of IMAX China to have their stock shipped over. And it is not the only case.
The Trojan Horse bucket produced by Snap Creative and sold in cinemas for 70 dollars is now being resold on eBay for 165 dollars. The red handbag bucket for The Devil Wears Prada 2 was stormed in pre-sale on the very day it was announced. Fans online declared: “I need this bucket more than I need oxygen”.
We are not talking about promotional gadgets but about collectible objects that encode an identity in physical form, and that, through popcorn, sell belonging, exclusivity and uniqueness.
This is the story of the BucketCinema, and of how it is changing the habits and customs of cinemagoers.
The principle: the bond between cinema and popcorn
The practice of limited-edition buckets is recent. But popcorn at the cinema has a much longer and more interesting history than people think.
Popcorn entered American cinemas in the 1930s, during the Great Depression, as a cheap food sold outside the theatres. Owners welcomed it reluctantly, fearing that the noise would disturb the screening. They gave in only when they realised that the five-cent snack could generate more margin than the ticket. From that moment, the relationship was inseparable.
The cardboard tub, the iconic one with red and white stripes, spread in the 1950s and 1960s. It became part of the collective imagination so quickly that it almost stopped being visible: it is simply there, like the darkness of the auditorium or the end credits.
The first themed collectibles arrived with the great sagas of the Nineties: Disney above all, turning cups and buckets into objects to keep. But it is with the new millennium that the practice takes shape: Marvel, Star Wars and the major franchises begin producing dedicated versions. The idea is not new. The scale, however, is.
The modern turning point came in February 2024, with Dune: Part Two and AMC’s sandworm-shaped bucket. It cost around twenty-five dollars, held less popcorn than a regular bucket, and was ugly in exactly the right way (clumsy, organic, alien). It went viral before the film even reached cinemas. Queues lasted hours. Resellers listed it on eBay at three times the launch price. AMC sold out and was left watching its own product fund the secondary market. From then on, every major release needed its own bucket. Not as an extra, but as a requirement.
A strong identity has unlimited surface area
Every successful bucket of recent years has one thing in common: it is instantly recognisable as belonging to a specific universe. The sandworm from Dune is the saga’s most iconic creature. The Trojan Horse is the central symbol of The Odyssey. The red handbag with its stiletto heel and devilish pitchfork is the perfect distillation of the aesthetic of The Devil Wears Prada 2.
Each of these objects works because the film already had an iconic element strong enough to be compressed into 30 euros of plastic and trigger instant recognition. The person who takes the Trojan Horse home therefore feels they are taking home proof of having been part of a cultural moment that will never come back.
A film (or any brand) without a strong visual identity cannot produce a bucket anyone wants. Not because the budget to design it is lacking, but because there is nothing to compress. In short, beyond its practical function and collectible value, the bucket today is physical proof that a film’s identity exists.
The bucket test applied to brands
The question this phenomenon poses to brands is simple and brutal: if we had to build a physical object that represents our identity, what would we create?
Brands that answer in under thirty seconds with a precise image have a strong identity. Brands that answer with a logo on a mug have an identity problem that no creative brief will be able to solve. The difference between the two lies not in the budget invested in design but in the depth of the narrative universe built over time.
The film industry understood this earlier than many other sectors. Variety reports that every major release now has a coordinated programme of collectibles exclusive to cinema chains: AMC, Regal and Cinemark each produce their own design for the same film. Anyone who wants the full collection has to go to three different places. Collecting becomes a driver of physical behaviour.
Dune has shown that every touchpoint with the audience, even the most mundane, now represents a unique commercial and cultural opportunity for those who have invested in a deep identity. And the popcorn bucket is simply the most literal demonstration of this principle.
Long live popcorn. Long live buckets. Long live cinema.
New Connections (FAQ)
Why does the bucket work for cinema and not for most other brands?
Because cinema has three structural advantages that most brands lack. First, a narrative universe that produces iconic images by definition: every film builds recognisable symbols. Second, a captive-audience purchasing context: whoever is in the cinema has already decided to invest in the film. Third, natural scarcity: the bucket exists only in the cinema or for a limited period. Brands outside cinema can replicate the logic only if they have an equally rich narrative universe and a community that identifies with a specific aesthetic. Supreme did it with skateboarding. Apple did it with design. Most brands have not yet built a universe deep enough to extract objects people want to keep at home.
Can a non-film brand apply this logic in practice?
Yes, but it requires an honest answer to the question: is there an iconic element of our identity that our audience would recognise immediately in physical form? If the answer is yes, the object is the starting point. If the answer is no, the problem lies further upstream: it is an identity that has not yet produced recognisable symbols. The bucket is the extreme form of the problem. The everyday version is any brand that wants to build loyalty without having something specific and recognisable enough to build it on.
How can you tell whether a brand has an identity strong enough to become an object?
A good test is to remove the logo. If colour, shape, material, symbol or detail still make the brand recognisable, it means that over time a system of distinctive codes has been built that is strong enough to live beyond traditional media. It is one of the checks that form part of Bliss’s Brand Identity and Brand Governance work: understanding which elements truly belong to the brand, which are merely decorative and which can be extended to packaging, retail, events, merchandising or new products without losing recognisability. The cinema bucket takes this principle to the extreme, but the question applies to any brand: what is left of us when we remove the logo?
BLISS®
© 2026. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED