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With head bowed and fist raised and lips slightly greased, picture me standing before you bravely as I solemnly declare: movie popcorn, it’s pretty boring, hey?

Now that I’ve exploded your entire worldview with little warning, like corn turned inside out, allow me to temper the flames slightly. Movie popcorn is fine. It’s salty, at least. There was once a time when people excitedly ate fudgy things wrapped in facts about Mel Gibson at the movies, so it could be way worse.

Enough with the fluffy corn already.Credit: Janet Briggs

And before yellow-suited secret agents start harassing me, I’m not even necessarily trying to dislodge Big Corn’s lock on cinemas’ candy bars. We live in a world where Nature’s Earth Cheesy Corn Chips (the crack of corn chips) exist, and yet we’re all expected to be happy with stale popcorn at the movies? It’s not right.

Why is popcorn the yang to cinema’s yin, anyway? Like Dr House, I looked it up: according to the Encyclopedia Britannica, popcorn’s popularity as a movie snack was cemented during the Great Depression, since it was cheap to make and buy. You think you’ve been making a savvy choice at your multiplex’s candy bar, but you’ve been willingly eating Depression food all this time. Even my grandma gave up polenta after the war.

Considering the cost of living crisis, eating like we’re street urchins from the 1920s might make perfect sense – if only popcorn prices were also Depression-era specific. Like Hermione Granger, I looked it up: a regular popcorn-and-Coke combo at your average multiplex chain costs $19. Maybe cinemas should start offering polenta.

Goopy polenta would be a muffled snack, at least. Meanwhile, movie popcorn is the noisiest food in existence. It’s like giving an entire audience giant maracas to shake during the quietest parts of Killers of the Flower Moon. Why is your hand rummaging around the bucket for so long, anyway? Just stick it in and pull something out. This isn’t a lucky dip, it’s all popcorn in there.

Well, mostly. By the time you get two-thirds into the bucket you’re already pulling out a handful of unpopped kernels. With any other uncooked meal you’d be sending it back to the waiter and saying, “I paid for this, please cook it properly”. But for some reason with popcorn we’re all like, “Sure, there’s a whole third of a box of raw stuff in here, that makes perfect sense…”

Popcorn never lasts through a movie, either. Most movies these days are more than three hours long, and no one has yet invented a box of popcorn that survives through 20 minutes of trailers. To have enough popcorn to last an entire movie, you’d have to spend $171 (that’s nine regular combos). Personally, I think that’s too much money for popcorn. At this point, considering where Martin Scorsese and Christopher Nolan have taken cinematic running times, the ultimate movie snack is clearly an everlasting gobstopper.

Of course, other snacks exist at your multiplex’s candy bar. Maltesers, for example. Maltesers are better than popcorn, but you shouldn’t eat three hours’ worth of Maltesers unless you’re trying to turn your insides into honeycomb. Choc Tops are messy; you exit the dark and realise you’ve had smears of melted chocolate and drippy ice cream stains all over your jeans throughout the whole film. And don’t bring up Gold Class or movie lounges, where waiters come out and serve you three-course meals featuring oysters and tiramisu, because they don’t count. That’s not grabbing a snack at the movies, that’s grabbing a movie at dinner.

I’ve found the answer. My new go-to movie snack is… bubble tea. It’s a drink and food, all in one container, and it lasts forever. Grab a large and by the time you’ve finished chomping all those pearls, made of whatever glorious goop – like Rupert Giles, I looked it up: it’s tapioca flour, mmm – you suddenly realise you’re already up to that scene in Killers of the Flower Moon where Jack White is being racist and Martin Scorsese is crying.

Bubble tea can get a bit noisy by the end, when you sound like a cocaine addict trying to slurp up that last elusive pearl, but it’s so mercifully brief that no one can complain. Unless you choke on it and start coughing for five minutes, in which case run out of the cinema and make the universal choking sign in front of the teenage usher, don’t just die ’cause you didn’t want to interrupt people’s enjoyment of Leonardo DiCaprio (I’ve been close).

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