It’s been a great year for movies. From the latest Spider-Man to the epic The Odyssey to quirkier offerings like Backrooms and The End of Oak Street, 2026 has had a little something for everyone. But even a terrible movie can be salvaged when the popcorn is hot, buttered and all mine. (What can I say? I like having my small popcorn to myself.)
Raise your hand if you pick your movie theater based on the popcorn. Mine’s up. Just last weekend, I headed to a small art theater in the middle of the morning just so I could sample the offerings at the concession stand. The flick I went to see, Matthew McConaughey’s The Rivals of Amziah King, wasn’t at my local Alamo Drafthouse (which has awesome popcorn, by the way), and I wasn’t in the mood for the popcorn at the mall.
Yes, popcorn can make or break a movie, but it hasn’t always been this way. In fact, popcorn wasn’t even sold at the movies in the early days. Say what? Movies without popcorn? To find out more about this totally shocking information, I consulted Joyce M. White, a food historian and the author of Cooking Maryland’s Way: Voices of a Diverse Cuisine, and Harry Marks, a classic film historian and creator of The Lobby film education platforms on TikTok, Instagram and YouTube.
Read on to learn the history of popcorn and the movies.
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When was popcorn invented?
Popcorn is American (more accurately, North and South American), and it goes back thousands of years. The oldest ears of popcorn were found along the northern coast of Peru and have been radio-carbon-dated to 6,700 years ago (or around 4600 BCE). Before that finding, which holds the current official Guinness World Record, the oldest evidence of people eating popcorn was from 5,600 years ago, in New Mexico.
White says the type of corn that makes popcorn, Zea everta, was one of the earliest domesticated types of maize in Mexico and what is now the American Southwest. “It did not reach the Eastern Seaboard until the early 19th century, when New England whalers likely brought it to New England from South America,” White says.
From there, it would be more than 100 years before it became a popular movie snack. Let’s take a look back at popcorn’s long road to stardom.
What is the history of popcorn?
Popcorn has been a part of our culture for hundreds of years, but getting it into movie theaters was a more recent endeavor. Here’s the prequel.
Early history
Popcorn was so important to Aztec and Peruvian Indians that when Spanish explorers arrived in the 16th century, they marveled at all the ways the native populations were using it. Here are contemporary accounts of Spanish reactions to this oddly prepared grain:
- “They scattered before him parched corn, called momochitl, a kind of corn which bursts when parched and discloses its contents and makes itself look like a very white flower; they said these were hailstones given to the god of water,” according to the Florentine Codex, a history compiled by Franciscan missionary Bernardino de Sahagun.
- “They toast a certain kind of corn until it bursts. They call it pisancalla, and they use it as a confection,” Bernabé Cobo, a Jesuit missionary, wrote in Historia del Nuevo Mundo.
- “And also a number of young women danced, having so vowed, a popcorn dance. As thick as tassels of maize were their popcorn garlands. And these they placed upon (the girls’) heads,” de Sahagun wrote again in the Florentine Codex.
East Coast arrival
“One of the earliest mentions of it in an American newspaper is found in an article about seed varieties from Burlington, Vermont, from 1835, where it states that a farmer planted a ‘small kind of chicken corn (or as the children call it, pop-corn, from its bursting so handsomely when roasted on a shovel),'” White says.
If holding a shovel full of corn over a fire sounds tedious (not to mention messy), early Americans thought so too. In the 1830s, people began using a wire basket with a long handle or just popping it in a pan like we do today. “By the 1840s and ’50s, it was much more widely known,” White says. “It was sold on street corners by ‘popcorn men’ and in hotels, where it was served with raisins and nuts for dessert.” Popcorn soon became a staple at picnics, parties and festivals.
“Sugar-coated popcorn, popcorn balls and even popcorn puddings were popular at this time,” White says. “By 1857, a commercial venture, The New England Popcorn Company, sold sugar-coated popcorn in ‘elegant tin boxes,’ which curiously was met with some ambivalence because it claimed that pre-popped popcorn took away the fun of popping it.”
Indeed, the Baton Rouge Tri-Weekly Gazette and Comet published a critique on June 27, 1857: “The pleasure indulged in, by adults as well as minors, over the fire in winter’s tedious nights, of popping corn, is taken away from us.”
Chicago World’s Fair
By the mid- to late 19th century, popcorn was fully integrated into American homes and culture—I remember reading about it in Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Farmer Boy, which took place in the late 1860s—but it didn’t get a commercial boost until the World’s Columbian Exposition, aka the Chicago World’s Fair, in 1893. That’s the year Charles Cretors patented a mobile popping machine he had invented two years earlier.
“1893 was a big year for Cretors,” Marks says. “He not only got the patent for his popcorn machine, but he also debuted it at the Chicago World’s Fair, where he gave away the product for free.” Cretors was trying to entice interest in his device—not the popcorn. “Instead, people got their free sample and loved it so much, they lined up to buy more from Cretors directly while at the Fair,” Marks says.
“From there, he developed horse-drawn popcorn wagons to take the tasty snack on the road,” Marks says. “But even at the turn of the century, as the film industry was growing, theaters had no interest in selling it, or really any snacks for that matter.” At least not yet.
The 20th century
As the new century dawned, popcorn came right along with it. Cracker Jack had been invented in 1896, but people also ate popcorn as “real” food too. Ella Eaton Kellogg, a dietitian and the wife of cereal magnate John Harvey Kellogg, reportedly ate popcorn in a bowl with milk, like cereal.
After Cretors’s popcorn machine took off, street vendors could easily follow crowds around cities or post up outside theaters and sporting events. “Popcorn’s popularity among sellers was due to its low cost to procure and produce,” Marks says. Even when the Depression hit in the 1930s, the delicious treat could be had for 5 or 10 cents a bag—an inexpensive luxury during hard times.
World War II further solidified popcorn’s popularity, as sugar rationing made candy scarce. Sales slumped a bit when television hit the scene, but popcorn never went away. In 1981, General Mills patented a microwave popcorn bag that popped kernels without scorching, and America’s favorite snack got even easier to eat at home.
How did popcorn make its way to movie theaters?
It took some time for popcorn and movies to go together. “Going to the theater was meant to be something special early in the 20th century,” Marks says. Popcorn, the crunchy, loud and cheap treat, didn’t figure into early theater managers’ game plans. Here’s how that changed.
Popcorn was originally “beneath” movie theaters
“Long before the corporate multiplexes we’re familiar with today, movie theaters—or, more accurately, movie palaces—wanted to demonstrate an air of sophistication to audiences, similar to that of an opera house,” Marks says. “The idea was to make the movies feel like going to see a live show, so they decked out their facilities with plush carpeting and extravagant decor.”
All those fancy adornments were expensive, and the last thing owners wanted were sticky drinks on the floor, greasy fingers on the armrests—”and stray popcorn kernels being ground into the floor by people’s shoes,” Marks says. Besides, concessions were thought to be “beneath” the high-brow entertainment movie houses were offering.
“There was also the noise issue,” Marks adds. “Early films were silent, but even though they were often accompanied by live musicians, theater owners didn’t want patrons crunching and crinkling their snacks during the shows.”
But … money talks
By the late 1920s, films were mostly “talkies” instead of silent, so Marks says the fancy, hushed-atmosphere argument against popcorn became moot. Economics soon ruled the day. “The Depression had made certain forms of entertainment unattainable to the wider public, so going to the movies became one of the last affordable luxuries people could bear,” Marks says.
“By 1930—one year after the market crash—American movie theaters were seeing as many as 90 million customers per week walk through their doors,” Marks says. “But they were still holding on to that last vestige of glamour from the past, so snacks were still not allowed into the theaters themselves.” Industrious vendors would stand outside hawking popcorn, but Marks says theaters would make patrons check their snacks like they would their coats!
That changed when some theaters allowed independent vendors to sell in their lobbies. “In fact, it was one Kansas City, Missouri, widow who changed the game for everyone,” Marks says. Julia Braden convinced the owner of the Linwood Theater to let her open a stand in the lobby. That one stand soon turned into four, and by 1931, Braden was earning over $14,000 a year—more than $330,000 today.
“Though technically there isn’t one person or theater credited with introducing popcorn to the masses, she’s kind of the de facto ‘Mother of Movie Theater Popcorn,'” Marks says.
Theaters pull back the welcome mat
Eventually, owners saw that there was real money to be made in concessions. They started popping their own popcorn and pushing out the independent vendors. “Many older theaters had to be renovated or modified to accommodate the poppers, as their focus on upscale decor meant little attention to proper ventilation,” Marks says.
How much popcorn do people eat these days?
A lot! Here’s a rundown of popcorn fun facts and figures.
- Americans eat about 14 billion quarts of popped popcorn each year. That’s about three cups (aka one serving) per week for every person in the country.
- Popcorn makes up 60% of movie theater concessions. The rest goes to candy, drinks and other food.
- Yellow popcorn for the win. Before the Depression, white corn was more popular. “Theaters actually preferred the yellow corn variety, which was twice as expensive as the white variety, but it popped larger, which filled the containers and bags with less popcorn as a result,” Marks says. That’s still true today.
- 88% of moviegoers say they order popcorn “regularly.” And 94% say they order concessions more generally, according to Fandango. Clearly, popcorn is the main draw.
- There’s a National Popcorn Day. And it’s celebrated on Jan. 19.
Sources:
- Harry Marks, film historian and creator of The Lobby film education platforms; email interview, Aug. 21, 2026
- Joyce M. White, food historian and author of Cooking Maryland’s Way: Voices of a Diverse Cuisine; email interview, Aug. 21, 2026
- National Agriculture Library: “Popcorn: Ingrained in America’s Agricultural History”
- Popcorn Board: “History of Popcorn”
- Newspapers.com: “Baton Rouge Tri-Weekly Gazette and Comet“
- Guinness World Records: “Earliest popcorn”
- Digital Florentine Codex: “Book 1, Gods”
- Fresh Air: “The History of Popcorn”
- Google Patents: “Packaged food item and method for achieving microwave browning thereof”
- SEC: “Cinemark: Form 10-K”
The post Here’s How Popcorn Became the Ultimate Movie Snack—And Why It Wasn’t Allowed in Theaters Originally appeared first on Reader's Digest.
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