McDonald's Gives Boo Buckets a Villains Makeover, Fans Ask About the Lids
McDonald's is bringing back Boo Buckets for Halloween 2026 with a Disney Villains twist. Starting Tuesday, Oct. 20, participating restaurants across the United States will replace the standard Happy Meal box with a collectible pail, available for a limited time while supplies last. The 2026 lineup has five designs: Jafar from Aladdin, Ursula from The Little Mermaid, Scar from The Lion King, Cruella from One Hundred and One Dalmatians, and Maleficent from Sleeping Beauty. Each pail comes with a villain-inspired lid and a sticker sheet, according to company materials cited by local broadcasters and national outlets.
McDonald's describes the five as Disney's most notorious scene-stealers, and several outlets note this is the first Boo Bucket collaboration of its kind. The meal itself is unchanged. Customers order a Boo Bucket Happy Meal with a choice of hamburger, with an option to add cheese, or four-piece or six-piece Chicken McNuggets, served with fries, apple slices and a drink. McDonald's has not set a fixed nationwide price. Local Gannett papers, citing menu-tracking sites, say a Happy Meal generally runs from 4 to 8 dollars depending on location, with each restaurant setting its own Boo Bucket meal price.
The timing matters. Boo Buckets debuted nationally in 1986 as Halloween Pumpkin Happy Meals with three orange pumpkin pails, after a test in New York and Boston a year earlier. Over the years they added ghosts, witches and goblins, glow-in-the-dark versions, and lids with built-in cookie cutters. They disappeared for a six-year stretch starting in 2016, returned in 2022, and have come back almost every Halloween since. The 2025 release offered five designs — goblin, ghost, pumpkin, zombie and cat — with glow-in-the-dark stickers. After past tie-ins with Scooby-Doo and Mr. Potato Head, a Disney Villains edition for the 40th anniversary looks like an attempt to turn nostalgia into collectibility.
The reaction among longtime fans has been sharply critical. On Instagram, the same complaint keeps appearing: where are the original lids. Many commenters said they had hoped for OG buckets with lids and would skip this year's release. One widely quoted comment said there was nothing cool or Halloween-themed about the villains and urged McDonald's to bring back buckets with lids or McNugget Buddies. Others asked simply, why Disney Villains. As Rolling Out and Yahoo chronicled, anger about missing lids dates back to the 2024 release, when fans called the handle-only pails knockoffs. McDonald's stopped including the original plastic lids in the 2000s, replacing them with plastic handles and sticker sheets, and fans have campaigned ever since for their return.
What comes next is a short, stock-dependent hunt. McDonald's says the buckets are available in restaurants and through the McDonald's app at participating locations until they sell out. Design availability varies by restaurant, and no specific design is guaranteed. For parents, the practical use remains the same: a ready-made trick-or-treat bag. For collectors, the test will be speed. If history is any guide, popular designs can disappear in the first week, leaving the bigger question for next Halloween: whether McDonald's will finally answer the lid campaign that has followed it for years.