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.
“One of the things that we actually thought
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