The official Garfield Movie popcorn bucket is killing us with curiosity

polygon.com:

Remember at the end of Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones, when the clone army is headed off to battle and Yoda gravely intones, “The shroud of the Dark Side has fallen. Begun, the Clone War has”? That was the first thing that went through my head when I saw Regal Cinemas’ official post on X (née Twitter), revealing the official popcorn bucket for The Garfield Movie.

We’ve entered the era of the ridiculous promotional popcorn bucket, the escalation zone where each major new movie is going to need a more elaborate, more unlikely, more impractical popcorn container than the last. These aren’t meant to meet the public’s slavering demand for popcorn — just for collectable novelty. It’s only going to get sillier from here.

Okay, wait, that’s an exaggeration. The first thing that went through my head wasn’t the Yoda quote. It was the same question raised by most of these collectible popcorn buckets: “But where does the popcorn go?”

Come for the collectible. Stay for the snacks.

'The Garfield Movie' collectible popcorn bucket is coming soon to Regal! pic.twitter.com/jN7SajdXbb

Look, we all know that nobody designing current movie-theater collectible merch is actually concerned with popcorn positioning. These putative snack-dispensers are all various degrees of dysfunctional for their stated purpose, whether that’s because they’re covered with spiky teeth in the general operational area or because they’re mimicking existing objects that were not designed primarily as popcorn holders. It really says something that, of the recent wave of promo popcorn buckets, the closest any of them has come to functionality was the one that involves eating popcorn directly out of Miles Morales’ skull.

We also know that the reflexive bafflement here is a feature, not a bug. The Garfield Movie popcorn bucket’s obvious unsuitability for popcorn-serving got Polygon staffers talking as we tried to figure out where the popcorn is even supposed to go. Is the whole thing hollow? Does it