There’s a war brewing in Hollywood and we’re not talking about how AI will inevitably kill us all by plagiarizing The Joker’s chaos plans from The Dark Knight. We’re talking about the popcorn bucket war.
The latest shot came from Dune director Denis Villeneuve in a red carpet interview in which he called the Wolverine & Deadpool popcorn bucket “horrific” and called the Dune buckets “unmatchable.”
Villeneuve did an impromptu interview with eTalkCTV where a reporter asked him about the feud that’s been brewing between him and Deadpool star Ryan Reynolds over their respective popcorn receptacles. The reporter showed Villeneuve a picture of the Deadpool & Wolverine bucket featuring the yellow Wolverine’s head and his gaping maw full of some of Orville Redenbacher’s finest. Villeneuve said he doesn’t have anything against the bucket but he thinks they are just riding the coattails he unfurled when the Dune sandworm popcorn bucket blew up the Internet.
“I’m not saying I don’t like the bucket,” Villeneuve said. “I’m just saying it was difficult to beat the Dune bucket. It was like one of a kind.”
He’s got a point. Popcorn buckets weren’t even a movie going craze until the release of the Dune 2 sandworm bucket, a popcorn tub that looks like a sex toy punishment designed by Pinhead from the Hellraiser movies. It sparked a whole new marketing trend for the struggling movie theater industry that’s been trying to fight the convenient onslaught of streaming media. Theaters and studios produced special buckets for other movies like Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire’s ghost trap and ECTO-1 buckets, Wonka’s Willy Wonka hat bucket and Inside Out 2’s core memory receptacle bucket.