The Wayans brothers’ new Scary Movie is leaning all the way into weed culture. There’s an official PAX vaporizer collab, a stoner parody series, a bong in the trailer, and a popcorn bucket shaped like a water pipe that the studio posted but nobody can confirm is actually for sale.
The Wayans are back, and so is Ghostface, and this time the whole thing is coated in resin. The new Scary Movie, in theaters June 5, is reuniting the original Core Four (Marlon Wayans, Shawn Wayans, Anna Faris and Regina Hall) for the first time since 2001, and Paramount’s marketing team has decided the way to sell a horror parody in 2026 is to aim it squarely at people who get high.
They’re not being subtle about it. The trailer features a bong and a jar of weed. There’s an official cannabis hardware collaboration. And there’s a piece of theater merch the studio posted that may or may not ever reach a concession stand, which is somehow the most on-brand thing about the entire campaign.
The PAX collab is real
The confirmed centerpiece is a team-up between PAX and Paramount Pictures: a limited-edition Scary Movie PAX Four, the same hardware as the brand’s flagship vaporizer, dressed in an onyx colorway with Scary Movie-inspired artwork and co-branded packaging. It’s a collectible aimed, in PAX’s own words, at “those who get elevated,” available while supplies last on pax.com.
PAX is also producing a four-part parody series called “Don’t Kill, Just Chill,” written by and starring comedian Justine Marino, that follows Ghostface and friends through what the brand describes as “absurdly chill scenarios” inspired by the franchise. A masked slasher who’d rather pack a bowl than chase a victim is a solid bit, and it’s exactly the lane this movie is driving in.
For PAX, the logic tracks. It’s a nearly two-decade-old hardware brand that markets itself on design and discretion, and a horror-comedy reboot built for a stoned Friday-night audience is about as clean a cultural fit as cannabis brands get in a business where most movie tie-ins are off-limits.
The bong popcorn bucket is a beautiful question mark
Then there’s the popcorn bucket. The official Scary Movie Instagram account posted images of a concession vessel shaped, unmistakably, like a glass water pipe: a globe-bottomed chamber packed with popcorn, a long vertical tube, a side stem, smoke billowing around it for effect, the Scary Movie logo on the side. A follow-up image showed four sizes lined up under the tagline “Choose the piece that fits you just right.”
The reveal is real. The studio posted it. What nobody can say for sure is whether the thing is an actual product headed to concession stands or an elaborate gag that lives only as a marketing reel. As Fantasy Land News, which tracks theater collectibles obsessively, put it, they don’t know if it’s a real product and they don’t think it is. And that uncertainty is the joke working exactly as designed.
This is a franchise that spent five films committing to every bit with zero restraint. A bong-shaped popcorn bucket is precisely the kind of thing the Scary Movie team would post as a fully produced promotional reel that’s also entirely a gag. It’s also precisely the kind of thing they’d actually manufacture and sell. With this series, both are equally believable, and the studio knows it. The ambiguity is the marketing.
It also lands in a moment where elaborate popcorn buckets have become their own arms race. Scream 7 has Ghostface busts and door-bursting collectibles at Cinemark and AMC. The Devil Wears Prada 2 has a handbag-shaped bucket. A bong bucket would just be the genre finally saying the quiet part out loud.
Why this matters beyond the gag
Strip away the jokes and there’s a real signal here. A major studio is comfortable building an entire promotional campaign around cannabis, openly, with an official hardware partner, in a way that would have been unthinkable for a mainstream theatrical release a decade ago. Weed in the trailer. A vape on the merch table. A stoner-coded slasher series on the brand’s channels. None of it is winking from the shadows. It’s the whole pitch.
Whether the bong bucket ever shows up at a concession stand almost doesn’t matter. The campaign already told you everything about where cannabis sits in mainstream culture in 2026: comfortable enough to headline a Paramount marketing push, and funny enough that a masked killer packing a vape reads as a punchline instead of a scandal.
Scary Movie hits theaters June 5.
