The Boys Season 5 introduced VMC Theatres as its fictional stand-in for AMC, complete with a Firecracker parody of the iconic Nicole Kidman “we make movies better” ad, and the Vought International account followed it up by dropping in-universe promotional marketing for a sculpted The Deep “Secrets of Atlantis” popcorn bucket, available “exclusively at VMC Theatres, not included with ticket purchase.” The internet immediately clocked what it was looking at. The Dune sandworm comparisons started within hours. This is exactly where we are now with theater collectibles, and it is genuinely funny.
The bucket itself is The Deep’s head, mouth open wide, styled as the vessel you reach into for popcorn. If that sounds familiar, it should. The Deadpool and Wolverine bucket from 2024 used the exact same format — Wolverine’s head, mouth open, tongue on the rim, butter drizzled down the chin in a promotional video that Ryan Reynolds made deliberately and with full knowledge of what he was doing. Kevin Feige had teased it at CinemaCon that year by saying there are movies that “inadvertently make crude and rude popcorn buckets,” and then there are buckets designed by Deadpool. The Dune: Part Two sandworm bucket was the inadvertent one Feige was referencing, a design that went so viral it got its own Saturday Night Live sketch and prompted AMC to say, publicly, that they would never have made it if they had known how it would be received. Reynolds called 2024 the year the War of the Popcorn Buckets began. The Boys Season 5 is writing that war into prestige television.
The Vought account posted the Deep bucket on May 8 with full press release language, exclusivity disclaimers and all. If you did not know the context, you might spend a full second wondering whether VMC Theatres is a regional chain you had not heard of. That is the joke and it lands, precisely because the real-world version of this marketing is so recognizable now that a fictional parody of it reads as completely plausible.
For anyone tracking real-world theater collectibles, the FLN Movie Theater Popcorn Bucket hub has the full breakdown of every actual bucket hitting concession stands this spring, and the list is the longest it has ever been. That context matters here. The Boys did not reach for popcorn buckets randomly. The writers chose them as cultural shorthand their audience would recognize immediately, and that recognition only works if the trend has crossed from enthusiast interest into something approaching common knowledge.
The AMC data makes the case. AMC CEO Adam Aron revealed earlier this spring that the chain sold two-thirds of its 500,000-unit Super Mario Galaxy Movie merchandise order in three days, generating an estimated $15 to $21 million in collectible revenue from a single film. That is not niche collector behavior. That is a mainstream purchasing event, and Hollywood has clearly been paying attention.
The Boys Season 5 finale airs May 20. Two days later, the real AMC will have AT-AT Walker buckets, Grogu Hover Prams, and Mandalorian Helmet cups at every concession stand for the opening of Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu. The fictional VMC and the real AMC will briefly exist in the same cultural moment, one week apart, and that overlap is not a coincidence. It is what happens when a trend gets big enough that prestige television starts writing it into the script.
Our Take: The lineage here is clear. Dune accidentally made something the internet could not stop talking about. Deadpool leaned into it on purpose. Now, The Boys has folded the entire genre into its satirical world-building. When a show this self-aware uses your industry as a punchline, it is not making fun of you. It is acknowledging that everyone already knows what you are. The popcorn bucket has become cultural vocabulary, and the Deep’s wide-open mouth at a fictional theater chain is the most unexpected proof of that yet. The real buckets have never been more worth collecting.
