Who is subjecting us to these things, and why do they hate popcorn?

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 collectible novelty. It’s only going to get sillier from here.

OK, 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?”

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 seeming unsuitability for popcorn serving got Polygon staffers talking as we tried to figure out where the popcorn is even supposed to go. Let’s assume the reclining chair is just for presentation, and the actual bowl is just the round Garfield piece. (Which seems likely, except that the scale of the chair seems way off, unless the bucket itself is a foot and a half across.) Is the whole thing hollow? Is the hole in the back of Garfield’s head, or, um, coming up from underneath him? Do you flip it over to use it, or sit him in your lap and eat out of the back of his head? Do his eyes pop out to reveal a hole that individual pieces of popcorn can be dispensed through? Is the gag here that obviously Garfield, a character known for voracious food-bogarting, has already eaten all your popcorn?

So yes, we know that we’re falling into Regal’s trap. We’re helping perpetuate the hype cycle, the no-such-thing-as-bad-publicity cycle, even by raising this question and putting this thing in front of your eyeholes. We’re sending the clones off to war. The shroud of the Dark Side truly has fallen.

But seriously. Why present something as a popcorn bucket, without any clear idea of where the popcorn would go? And how much more absurd is the next promotional popcorn bucket going to get in order to keep the trend rolling?