National Popcorn Day

The Glorious Unhealthy Bin

I love popcorn, and I especially love movie popcorn. There’s something about the butter and the grease and the big bin you carry to your seat. I’m sure it’s horribly unhealthy. That’s part of why it’s so good. The popcorn is half of what made the moviegoing trip feel special, the smell of it in the lobby, the bin in your lap, the butter on your fingers by the end. You don’t eat it because it’s good for you. You eat it because it belongs to the experience.

Most of my movie watching now happens at home, where I keep a shelf of about 2,500 Blu-rays and DVDs and watch one most nights. But even at home, the popcorn is part of the ritual. Some things are just bound together, and movies and popcorn are one of those pairs.

Watch: Why Nothing Else Tastes Like Movie Theatre Popcorn, Weird History Food

Why Popcorn Owns the Movies

Popcorn wasn’t always a movie thing. Early theaters banned it, worried the noise and the mess would cheapen the experience. Then the Depression hit.

Popcorn was cheap to make and cheap to buy, a few cents for a bag, and people could afford a small treat even when they could afford almost nothing else.

Theaters that let vendors sell it outside started bringing the popping inside, and the profit margins were enormous. The snack ended up carrying theaters through hard years when ticket sales alone couldn’t. Concession popcorn became the thing that kept the lights on.

To this day, theaters make far more from the snack counter than from the tickets, and that’s why the bin costs what it does.

So the butter-soaked bin is the financial backbone of the moviegoing business. The thing you feel slightly guilty about buying is the thing keeping the theater open.

The Little Theater in San Bernardino

My favorite popcorn memory is tied to one place, and it wasn’t a multiplex.

There was a little theater in downtown San Bernardino that ran matinees and evening shows of older, eclectic movies, the kind nobody had seen in years. They’d put on something like the Rocky Horror Picture Show, long after it came out, for a single evening, and the place would be packed. People came out for the strange, the cult, the films you couldn’t catch anywhere else. A small room, a screen, a bin of popcorn, and a crowd that wanted to be there for something offbeat.

Those nights were the best of moviegoing. Not the blockbuster opening, but the revival house showing a film for the love of it, with an audience that came because it was weird and rare.

Most of those little theaters are gone now, the same slow decline that took the independent bookstores. But the memory of one packed evening, popcorn in hand, watching something nobody else was showing, is exactly what the big chains can never replicate.

How do you spend National Popcorn Day?

Make popcorn and watch a movie. The assignment writes itself.

Do it right. That means real butter and more of it than is reasonable, the way the theater does. Pop it on the stove if you want the good stuff, or get a bag, but make it part of a movie. If you have a little revival theater or a drive-in near you that still runs older films, go support it, because those are the places where popcorn and movies still mean what they used to.

Pick something worth the popcorn, settle in, and enjoy the one snack that helped build the entire film business.

National Popcorn Day FAQ