What Ever Happened To Drive-In Movie Theaters?

It's Tuesday, June ninth. Summer blockbuster season is here, and I was at the movies last night, which got me thinking about a version of the moviegoing experience that barely exists anymore. At their peak in the late 1950s, there were over four thousand drive-in movie theaters in the United States. Today there are about three hundred. They didn't die because people stopped loving movies or stopped loving cars. They died because the land they were sitting on became worth more than anything they could project onto a screen. I'd love to go to a drive-in, but I live in the Bay Area and don't have a car, which is actually a pretty good summary of why they disappeared. On June 6, 1933, a man named Richard Hollingshead (HOLL-ings-hed) opened the first drive-in movie theater in Camden, New Jersey. The story of how he got there is almost too simple to believe. His mother found indoor theater seats uncomfortable. So Hollingshead mounted a projector on the hood of his car in his driveway, pinned a screen between two trees, and played a movie. He tested the concept for months, experimenting with different parking angles and spacing until he found a layout where every car had a clear sightline to the screen. He filed a patent, spent $30,000 to build a proper lot that held about 400 cars, and charged twenty five cents per person plus twenty five cents per car. The idea spread slowly through the 1930s and then exploded after World War II. Returning soldiers were buying houses in the suburbs, having kids, and buying cars, and the drive-in was perfectly designed for all three of those things at once. You didn't need a babysitter. You didn't need to dress up. You could bring your kids in their pajamas, let them fall asleep in the back seat, and watch the movie from the front. The concession stand was the center of the social experience: burgers, popcorn, hot dogs, milkshakes. Some drive-ins had playgrounds, miniature golf courses, and laundromats. The Johnny All-Weather Drive-In in Copiague (koh-PAY-gyoo), New York, which opened in 1957, held 2,500 cars and had a full-service restaurant, a playground, and a shuttle train to carry people between their cars and the amenities. By the late 1950s, there were over four thousand drive-ins in the United States, and in some accounts over five thousand. They were the default entertainment venue for suburban families and teenagers alike, and they generated enough revenue that Hollywood started producing movies specifically for the drive-in audience: horror films, sci-fi B-movies, beach party films, anything that looked good on a big screen from a hundred feet away and didn't require you to hear every word of dialogue over the sound of your car radio. The decline started in the mid-1960s and accelerated through the 1970s, and the reasons are layered on top of each other in a way that made the outcome basically inevitable. The first problem was daylight saving time. The Uniform Time Act of 1966 standardized daylight saving across most of the country, and during peak drive-in season, summer, it meant the sun didn't set until after 9 PM in most places. That's really late to start a movie, especially if you've got kids in the back seat. Drive-ins had thrived when showtime was 8 PM. Pushing it to 9:30 or later shrank the audience immediately. The second problem was competition. Indoor multiplex cinemas started appearing in the 1960s and offered something drive-ins couldn't: multiple screens under one roof, climate control, better sound, and the ability to show movies rain or shine, day or night, twelve months a year. A drive-in operated maybe six months out of the year in northern states. A multiplex operated every day. Then cable television arrived in the 1970s, followed by VCRs in the 1980s, followed by DVDs, followed by streaming. Each new way to watch movies at home made the drive to the drive-in a little harder to justify. But the thing that actually killed most drive-ins was none of that. It was real estate. A drive-in needs a minimum of about fifteen acres of flat land near a population center. In 1955, that land was cheap suburban farmland on the edge of town. By 1985, that same land was worth a fortune. The suburbs had expanded around the drive-in, and suddenly the owner was sitting on fifteen acres of commercially zoned property surrounded by shopping centers and housing developments. A developer would show up with an offer that dwarfed anything the drive-in could generate in a decade of ticket sales. The math was simple and it was brutal: sell the dirt, retire comfortably, or keep projecting movies onto a screen and watch your property taxes climb every year while your audience shrinks. Most owners sold. Drive-in lots became Walmarts, strip malls, subdivisions, and parking lots. The theaters weren't torn down because the movies stopped mattering. They were torn down because the land mattered more. It's the same pattern we covered in the McDonald's episode: Ray Kroc figured out that the real business wasn't burgers, it was the land underneath the restaurant. Drive-in owners reached the same conclusion, except they were the ones selling instead of buying. In March 2020, every indoor entertainment venue in the country shut down overnight. Movie theaters went dark. Concert halls closed. Restaurants switched to takeout. And for a brief, strange moment, drive-ins were the only game in town. The roughly 300 remaining drive-ins in America suddenly found themselves as the safest way to see a movie outside your living room. You stayed in your car. You didn't touch anyone. The screen was a hundred feet away. Some drive-ins reported their best attendance in decades. New pop-up drive-ins appeared in parking lots and fairgrounds across the country. Amazon, Walmart, and local entrepreneurs set up inflatable screens and sold tickets. For about eighteen months, the drive-in looked like it might actually come back. It didn't. Once indoor theaters reopened and streaming services had spent the pandemic training people to watch new releases at home on the day they came out, the pop-ups closed and attendance at the surviving drive-ins settled back to roughly where it had been before. The ones that survived COVID are mostly the ones that had already survived everything else: family-run operations in rural or exurban areas where land is still relatively cheap and the community treats the drive-in as a local institution worth preserving. Ohio, New York, and Pennsylvania each have about thirty, the most of any state. The broader story of movie theaters in general follows a similar arc, just on a longer timeline. Total US theater screens peaked at roughly 44,000 in 2019. The pandemic accelerated a shift toward streaming that was already underway, and while box office revenue has recovered somewhat, the number of mid-budget films getting theatrical releases has shrunk dramatically. Studios now reserve theaters for franchise blockbusters and release almost everything else straight to streaming. The theatrical experience isn't dead, but it's becoming a luxury product rather than a default activity, something you do for the big screen spectacle, not for the Tuesday night movie you might have gone to ten years ago. I was at the movies last night and the theater was packed, which felt good. There's something about watching a movie with strangers in a dark room that a living room can't replicate, a collective gasp, a shared laugh, the weird intimacy of experiencing a story at the same time as two hundred people you'll never meet again. Drive-ins had their own version of that: the rows of cars, the glow of the screen, kids running around the playground, the tinny sound coming through the speaker hooked to your window. Both experiences are about something bigger than the movie itself. The movie is the excuse. The experience is the product. And the land underneath it has always been worth more than either one. So if this comes up in conversation, here's how to think about it. Drive-in movie theaters peaked at over four thousand in the late 1950s, built for a country that was buying suburban houses, having kids, and driving everywhere. Today there are about three hundred left. They didn't die because of streaming or multiplexes, although those didn't help. They died because the fifteen acres of land each one sat on became worth more as a shopping center or a subdivision than it could ever generate from ticket sales. Daylight saving time pushed showtime past 9 PM during summer, shrinking the family audience. Multiplexes offered more screens year-round. VCRs, DVDs, and streaming made staying home easier. But the killing blow was always the real estate. COVID gave them a brief, strange comeback that lasted about as long as the pandemic did. The ones that survive now are mostly rural, family-run, and held together by communities that decided the experience was worth more than the land value. The drive-in didn't fail as entertainment. It failed as a use of real estate. And in America, the real estate usually wins. Stay informed, stay curious, and we'll see you tomorrow.