Venom 3’s Popcorn Bucket Has Been Revealed & It Needs More Tongue

It seems that in 2024, if movies are not going to save movie theaters, novelty popcorn buckets will have to do it. Though popcorn buckets with specific movie themes have been around for years (and many have been great), it really seems like it was this year that kickstarted a new trend and made these buckets reach new levels of popularity. It all started when the “Dune 2” popcorn bucket was unleashed on unsuspecting audiences who did not expect such an, um, explicit popcorn bucket that took the internet, and “Saturday Night Live,” by storm.

Since then, the popcorn bucket industry (an insane series of words to string together) took off through the sheer power of memes (and occasionally Ryan Reynolds), forcing otherwise serious journalistic outlets to do very serious reporting work and provide a serious review of the “Despicable Me 4” popcorn bucket as a public service. It doesn’t matter what kind of movie it is, whether it’s a big studio or even a smaller indie like “Terrifier 3” — seemingly every movie gets a popcorn bucket of dubious design.

Now we have the latest contender in the novelty popcorn bucket wars, and it is all about “Venom: The Last Dance,” the latest entry in what is, so far, the only successful Sony Spider-Man movie not starring Spider-Man (no, “Morbius” was not it). But where some buckets have gone too far, this one actually doesn’t go far enough.

The popcorn bucket is simple enough, following the recent trend of having users reach their arms into characters’ mouths. But for a bucket meant to be about a character as gnarly as Venom, not including the character’s extremely long tongue — maybe even in a position that could provide plenty of its own innuendo opportunities — feels like a missed opportunity. 

Venom: The Last Dance popcorn bucket coming from Regal, a huge step up from the previous two.

What else might you display in his mouth? pic.twitter.com/QKvpXVusEu

— TheVenomSite (@thevenomsite) September 18, 2024

This is especially true considering the version of Venom we see in the Sony trilogy, where these movies are quite clearly romantic comedies and the relationship between Eddie and Venom is more than it may appear: They are the best couple in the Marvel multiverse, and they deserve better than a boring popcorn bucket without an obscenely long tongue that makes grabbing popcorn from this thing absurdly difficult and wildly inconvenient.

At least it seems the underwhelming popcorn bucket may be thematically resonant, as the latest trailer for “Venom: The Last Dance” indicates the happy days are over and the Venom/Eddie romance will end in tragedy. 

Now we’re left to hope that the “Kraven the Hunter” popcorn bucket might have some more creativity to it.