AMC expects collectible buckets to bring in $100 million this year. The interesting part is not the number. It is that theaters finally found a product that does not require anyone to buy a ticket.
AMC Theatres estimates that special-edition popcorn buckets will generate roughly $100 million in revenue in 2026, close to double the 2023 level. Cinemark says buckets helped lift its merchandise revenue 40% from 2024 to 2025, and Regal expects merchandise sales above $40 million this year. Two buckets tied to Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey” sell for $50 and $70. AMC’s average moviegoer, ticket and snacks combined, spent $22.10 across all of 2025.
That last comparison is the entire story. For more than a century, every dollar a movie theater earned required a person to physically sit in a seat. Buckets are the first product on the menu that does not.
Bill Howard surrendered his cellphone, signed a nondisclosure agreement, and sat alone on the Universal lot for ninety minutes with a paper script and a single notepad. He is not a director or a cinematographer. He is 71 years old and he runs a 55 person company in Camarillo, California that makes plastic containers. The studio treated the script like a state secret because Howard needed the story beats to design a bucket, and the bucket now matters enough to warrant an NDA.
What Happened
The New York Times reported on July 23 that collectible concession vessels, the formal industry term, have quietly grown into a $100 million category at AMC alone. Nels Storm, AMC’s vice president of food and beverage product strategy, said the business effectively did not exist for the chain seven years ago.
Howard’s firm, Snap Creative, made both of this summer’s headline buckets for “The Odyssey”: a replica of Nolan’s IMAX camera at $50 and a 22 inch Trojan horse at $70. IMAX chief executive Rich Gelfond was openly skeptical that anyone would pay $50 for a popcorn container. He approved a cautious first run of 2,500 units. They sold out almost immediately. The second run of 2,500 sold out in seven minutes. Gelfond ended up calling his counterpart at IMAX China to beg for that market’s inventory, since the film does not open there until August. IMAX now believes it has moved roughly 30,000 buckets and describes itself as all in.
The detail that should interest anyone who studies revenue models is buried in the middle of that story. Buyers frequently order the buckets in advance and receive them in the mail. Empty. No popcorn, no ticket, no theater visit.
The Backstory
Concession containers are not new. Themed ones are not new either. The industry generally traces the current boom to two moments.
The first was 2019, when a 17 inch R2-D2 replica commissioned for “The Rise of Skywalker” sold far better than anyone modeled. The second was 2024, when the bucket for “Dune: Part Two,” shaped like the gaping mouth of a sandworm, became an internet phenomenon for reasons that had nothing to do with popcorn and everything to do with what it resembled. It earned a “Saturday Night Live” sketch. Ryan Reynolds later tried to escalate the joke with a Wolverine themed vessel for the “Deadpool” franchise.
Three suppliers now control almost the entire category. Snap Creative is one. Golden Link, based in New York, is the bucket partner for Disney Studios. Zinc, an Australian firm, handled “Dune” and “Mission: Impossible.” All three license film IP from the studios and co-design with them. Snap’s creative director recently stood on the Atlanta set of the next “Superman” and talked concepts directly with James Gunn.
Howard credits Gen Z with converting a novelty into a category, describing an audience that wants memeable, limited drop events. But the demographic story is thinner than it sounds. In May, a red handbag shaped bucket for “The Devil Wears Prada 2” sold out over opening weekend, and much of that demand came from older women who loved the original film twenty years ago. This is not a youth trend. It is a fandom trend, and fandom has no age ceiling.
The Plan
Every major exhibitor is now treating buckets as a managed product line rather than a seasonal gimmick.
AMC has built a dedicated food and beverage product strategy function around it. Cinemark’s senior vice president of food and beverage strategy, David Haywood, said demand for the “Prada” bucket was unbelievable and that if he could redo the order he is not sure there is a quantity he would refuse. IMAX has gone from skeptic to evangelist inside a single release window. Regal is running merchandise as a marketing line item with its own head of marketing commenting on inventory strategy.
The products themselves are escalating. At the end of August, for the rerelease of “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone,” Snap will unveil a four foot replica of the Nimbus 2000 broomstick. It sells for $50 and holds 135 ounces of popcorn, which is 270% of what the “Odyssey” Trojan horse holds.
Here is the number that gives away the game. A conventional large paper bucket holds 170 ounces. The $70 Trojan horse holds 50. Customers are paying a very large premium for less than a third of the popcorn.
The Business Model Angle
Exhibition has always been a brutal business for one structural reason: revenue is a pure function of attendance. Tickets require a body. Concessions require a body. Screen advertising is priced off bodies. Premium formats raise the yield per body but do not change the dependency. When attendance falls, every line item falls together, and the fixed cost of the real estate does not move at all.
Buckets break that link for the first time. A pre-ordered bucket shipped empty to a customer’s house is not concession revenue. It is licensed merchandise sold through an e-commerce channel that happens to be owned by a theater chain. The customer never enters the building. AMC has, almost by accident, opened a revenue line that is decoupled from the one variable that has defined and constrained its model since 1920.
The unit economics explain the enthusiasm. AMC’s average patron produced $12.09 in admissions and $7.62 in food and beverage across 2025, for $22.10 total. A single Trojan horse bucket at $70 is worth 3.2 average moviegoers. Because roughly two thirds of incremental revenue drops through to adjusted EBITDA on AMC’s operating leverage, the margin profile is closer to retail than to food service.
Now follow the value chain, because that is where the real lesson sits.
The studio licenses IP it already owns and already paid for. Its marginal cost is a contract, and its royalty is close to pure margin. It also gets a marketing asset that fans voluntarily photograph and distribute. The vendor, Snap or Golden Link or Zinc, absorbs the design, tooling, and manufacturing risk, and earns a manufacturer’s margin. The exhibitor buys the inventory, holds it, and captures the retail spread.
The studio has the best seat in the chain by a wide margin. This is the same structure that governs the film itself, where the distributor takes its cut off the top and the exhibitor lives on what is left. Buckets did not change the balance of power in Hollywood. They just extended it into a new product category. For a fuller picture of how a studio compounds a single character into decades of licensing income, Disney’s business model is the canonical version of this machine.
The Risk
The bull case is easy. The skeptical case is more useful, and there are four parts to it.
Exhibitors just imported inventory risk into a business that never had it. This is the underappreciated point. Film prints arrive on consignment. Popcorn is a commodity with a long shelf life, no branding, and infinite reorder flexibility. Buckets are the opposite: single title, single release window, no reorder, no residual value once the film leaves theaters. Vikki Neil, head of marketing at Regal Global Entertainment, described exactly this problem, asking what a chain is supposed to do with unsold merchandise. Ship it back. Discount it. It gets complicated. Exhibitors have thin balance sheets and, in AMC’s case, negative free cash flow of $366 million in 2025. Stranded inventory is not a rounding error for a company in that position.
The hit rate is not forecastable. “Supergirl” underperformed and so did its bucket, which inexplicably featured a sidekick rather than the title character. “Masters of the Universe” disappointed, and its Skeletor throne bucket did too, yet a second bucket from the same film, Castle Grayskull, was a hit. Pixar’s “Hoppers” performed and its beaver dam bucket did not. There is no reliable mapping from box office to bucket demand, which means every order is a judgment call with real cash behind it.
It is slate dependent, which makes it a box office amplifier, not a hedge. Buckets only exist when tentpoles exist. In a thin release year, bucket revenue collapses in the same quarter that admissions do. This adds volatility to earnings rather than smoothing it.
And the scale should be kept in proportion. AMC’s 2025 revenue was $4.84 billion. A $100 million bucket line is about 2% of that. It is real, it is high margin, and it is growing fast. It is not a turnaround. Anyone reading this as the thing that saves exhibition is repeating the mistake MoviePass investors made when they confused an interesting mechanic with a viable model.
One more note on the collectible thesis. A batch of 20 buckets for “The Accountant 2” recently sold on eBay for $550, which works out to about $27.50 each. Some buckets appreciate. Many do not. The secondary market is not uniformly up, and any argument built on resale value needs to reckon with that.
Quick Questions
How much money do popcorn buckets make? AMC estimates roughly $100 million in bucket revenue for 2026, nearly double its 2023 level. Regal expects merchandise sales above $40 million this year, and Cinemark reported merchandise revenue up 40% from 2024 to 2025 with buckets as a driver.
Why do collectible popcorn buckets cost $50 to $70? Because they are priced as licensed collectibles rather than as food packaging. The $70 “Odyssey” Trojan horse holds 50 ounces of popcorn, while a standard large paper bucket holds 170 ounces. Buyers are paying for the object, not the capacity.
Who actually makes movie theater popcorn buckets? Three companies handle nearly all of them. Snap Creative in California made both “Odyssey” buckets, Golden Link in New York is Disney’s partner, and Australia’s Zinc produced the “Dune” and “Mission: Impossible” designs. Each licenses film IP from the studio and co-designs with the filmmakers.
Do you have to buy popcorn or a ticket to get one? No, and this is the commercially significant part. Many buyers order in advance online and receive the bucket by mail with no popcorn inside and no theater visit, which turns a concession item into a direct to consumer merchandise sale.
Are popcorn buckets a good investment? Inconsistently. Scarce buckets from culturally resonant films can appreciate, but a lot of them do not. A recent lot of 20 “The Accountant 2” buckets sold on eBay for $550, roughly $27.50 apiece, well under the shelf price of the premium designs.
The Business Model Analyst Take
The popcorn bucket boom is being covered as a curiosity, and it is a genuinely funny story. But strip out the sandworm jokes and what is left is a serious structural observation.
Movie theaters spent twenty years trying to escape the tyranny of attendance. They tried subscriptions, dine-in menus, alcohol licenses, premium formats, private rentals, and concert films. Every one of those still requires a customer to drive to the building. The bucket is the first product that generates theater revenue from someone sitting at home, and nobody planned it. It arrived as a merchandising afterthought and turned into the only genuinely attendance independent line on the menu.
The strategic question for AMC, Regal, and Cinemark is whether they recognize what they are holding. Right now they are treating buckets as a concession category, which means they are optimizing for what sells inside the lobby. The larger opportunity is to treat themselves as fandom retailers with 900 physical locations, an owned e-commerce channel, first party data on who bought tickets to which franchise, and direct relationships with every studio in Hollywood. That is a different company than a theater chain.
The obstacle is not demand. It is that exhibitors have never had to build a merchandising competency, and the failures are already visible in the beaver dam and the Skeletor throne. Retail is a forecasting discipline, and forecasting a collectible is genuinely hard. Pop Mart built a multibillion dollar company on exactly this skill and still gets it wrong regularly.
Our read: this is a real and durable category, not a fad, because it is powered by fandom rather than novelty, and fandom does not expire. But it will stay a 2% line item until someone at a major chain stops thinking of it as popcorn and starts thinking of it as retail. The chain that hires a merchandising executive instead of another food and beverage strategist will be the one that finds out how big this actually gets. Meanwhile, the premium format economics that made Nolan’s “The Odyssey” opening so profitable and the bucket boom are the same phenomenon viewed from two angles: audiences will pay steep premiums for scarcity and for proof they were there.
