The makers of Dune 2’s viral popcorn bucket didn’t see the jokes coming

No one is surprised that Dune: Part Two has turned into one of 2024’s biggest movies. Denis Villeneuve’s blockbuster sequel is full of bona fide movie stars, and it’s excellent to boot. What did come as a surprise, however, is that the movie’s AMC Theatres promotional popcorn bucket got almost as much buzz as the movie itself in the weeks before release. The sandworm-shaped bucket that lets patrons reach into the worm’s maw for a handful of popcorn is incredible, unique, and vaguely off-putting in a way that took the internet by storm the instant it appeared online.

To find out exactly how the internet’s favorite popcorn bucket came to be, Polygon sat down with a few people from Zinc Group, the company behind this year’s most interesting movie tie-in.

According to Marcus Gonzalez, Zinc Group’s global creative director, the process for the Dune: Part Two bucket started the same as any other project, with the team poring over the style guide provided by Warner Bros., then figuring out what direction to go in. On 3D projects — like the Dune bucket, and many of Zinc’s other premium buckets — Gonzalez says that the team has a lot of freedom in how they approach the design. All that matters is that it hits on an iconic design from the movie that fans will recognize instantly. For projects like Star Wars, that can be easy, but Dune proved a little more difficult.

“We were kind of scratching our heads,” Gonzalez says. “We kept going back and forth going, ‘Is the pain box going to work?’ And although the pain box is iconic, and it’s something that Dune fans know, it also has to be something that is recognizable. It’s got to have that nag factor so someone has to be like, Oooh, I want that.”

But the one idea the team kept coming back to was Shai-Hulud, the franchise’s giant and instantly recognizable sandworm. However, even when the team knew they were doing a design based on the worm, their direction still wasn’t quite clear.

Image: Warner Bros.

“One of the things that we actually thought of, because it’s iconic, you’ve seen it on the cover art, you’ve seen it in stills and art people make, is the character riding on the worm,” Gonzalez says. “It’s a cool scene. [...] So we thought it would be kind of a nice collectible to do that as well. But from a scale perspective, it’s going to be like a little micro dot based on the size of the worm. It wasn’t going to work for a lot of different reasons. It could break in transit. How are you going to paint something that’s like a quarter of an inch tall?”

On top of all that, doing something based on the full worm also had another unexpected (and eventually ironic) problem.

“The worm always posed a problem, even when the book was written and they had illustrations based off it,” Gonzalez says. “Because, you know, it looks like something. So we opted to not do the full worm for that very reason, which, I guess it doesn’t matter.”

Photo: Chris Plante/Polygon

In fact, the internet’s myriad of not-safe-for-work jokes about the final Dune: Part Two bucket design came as a complete surprise to the folks at Zinc.

That thing sat in our office for six months,” Rod Mason, Zinc Group’s vice president of business development, tells Polygon. “It sat in Legendary’s office for six months, because, you know, they moved the movie. And it sat in AMC’s office for six months. There was a couple of things said, but no one equated it to what happened.”

“You don’t know what the internet is going to latch on to and how they’re going to latch on to it,” adds Gonzalez.

But the popcorn bucket inspired more than just jokes. It also inspired sales, quickly selling out at AMC theaters around the United States and driving a thriving secondhand market for the item. The collectible even inspired some fun interactions with Dune: Part Two’s cast during the movie’s press tour, with most members reacting with comical unease.

As for how they landed on the design that the team at Zinc, and eventually the internet, latched on to, Gonzalez says it all started with a suggestion from the art director.

“My art director suggested, ‘Hey, what if it was a worm coming out of the sand but we do it as a lid to go on top of a tin?” Gonzalez explains. “I thought, Well, that’s actually perfect.”

As he describes it, this approach has appeal on two levels; the team could add art to the tin as well as the sandworm topper, giving it something for both huge Dune fans and people who just wanted to see the movie. After the initial idea, the art director quickly landed on the missing link: grabbing the popcorn through the worm’s teeth. The idea gave Gonzalez pause at first, worrying that anything they did might be too sharp to reach through, but they landed on a silicone material that was perfect for both making the bucket look like the iconic mouth from the movies and letting people easily grab their popcorn.

After a quick 3D mock-up by the art director, and a final approval, 2024’s most surprising collectible was born. And in nearly its final form, too. Gonzalez notes that normally the next step in the process would be back-and-forth revisions with Zinc’s studio and exhibitor partners. But for this project there were almost none — with the exception of a few notes about the art on the tin.

In fact, the harshest notes seemed to come from Mason, a huge Dune fan himself, who thought the worm’s teeth could have been a little more accurate.

Photo: Chris Plante/Polygon

“I don’t think we did it the right way, to be honest,” Mason says. “If you are a fan, which I am, you know that those teeth in the worm’s mouth are very random. Whereas the item we ended up producing was very uniform, which probably led to the social media heat. I would have liked to have seen it a lot more randomly done with the teeth, given it more teeth and alternating, and finer. It’s one of these things where you try and go for as much realism as possible. But then you have the manufacturing limitations.”

But aside from that small quibble, and some unexpected jokes on social media, both Mason and Gonzalez seem thrilled with how everything around the Dune: Part Two bucket has played out. And more importantly, it’s given the popcorn bucket market a much brighter future than anyone would have expected, both commercially and creatively.

“It’s definitely put popcorn buckets, particularly premium ones, on the radar,” says Gonzalez. “Good or bad, depending on what your point of view is, it was definitely a game changer. Because more people are looking at it, and more people are thinking about it. [...] Forbes and Hollywood Reporter and a lot of those guys are referring to this as the golden age of popcorn buckets. I’m not sure if I agree with that. I think we’re still kind of moving up.”

The whole experience even got Gonzalez thinking about how to apply the same design principles — and even sensory reactions — from the Dune: Part Two bucket to something else in the future.

“It isn’t just about sticking your hand in a dark hole. It’s: What’s the cool factor about it? Are you sticking your hand through a neck hole from a severed head for a zombie movie or something? [But] that completely changes the perceived ick factor on it.”