The ornate collectable popcorn bucket is one of movie theaters’ go-to gimmicks to get butts in seats. Sure, they cost an arm and a leg often, but cinephiles will shell out for limited edition items. That’s how you get massive character heads or a sandworm of suggestive shape and orifice. At any rate, they’ve gotten bigger and more weirderer over the past few years as attendance to movie theaters has dwindled. Usually these will have something to do with the movie, but the first collectible popcorn bucket for Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey isn’t Odysseus’ ship or the Trojan Horse or a Cyclops. No, it’s a big ol’ IMAX camera.
IMAX camera are big ol’ things in order to fit the double-sized 70mm film. Nolan has long championed IMAX as the best filming format for movies dating all the way back to 2008 with The Dark Knight. His movies do feel grandiose, and the frame size is a big part of that. However, I have to say, just a square box, even with the lens and a viewfinder, isn’t the most exciting of popcorn buckets. Real film snobs, however, will probably eat this up with a spoon. It’s also easily the most Christopher Nolan thing of all time. It’s not about the story it’s about C I N E M A.
Nolan’s previous film, Oppenheimer, won all the awards at the Oscars. Thanks to the Barbenheimer movement, ended up a huge box office hit as well. A Nolan movie will always draw a certain number of people to the theater, but recent tracking suggests a drop in interest following the most recent trailer. The movie cost a staggering $250 million, and with a near-three-hour runtime and an R rating, it’ll face a bit of an uphill climb, even for Mr. IMAX himself. Maybe a popcorn bucket will help make up the difference. In any case, this July’s box office will be an odyssey in and of itself.
The Odyssey hits theaters July 17.
Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. He hosts the weekly pop culture deep-dive podcast Laser Focus. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Letterboxd.
