There's a drive-in theater about forty miles from where I grew up. I went there at age nine to see a double feature I wasn't supposed to be awake for, wedged between my parents in the front seat of a Buick with the window half-down and the tinny speaker hooked to the door. I fell asleep before the second film and woke up in my bed with no memory of how I got there. I've been trying to recapture that exact feeling ever since.
Drive-in theaters were supposed to be gone by now. The industry peaked in 1958 with over four thousand screens across the country, then spent the next three decades in steady, apparently terminal decline. By the early 1990s, the eulogies had been written. Real estate was worth more than nostalgia. The projectors went dark.
And then they didn't. The ones that held on — through digital conversion costs, through the rise of home video, through streaming, through everything — found themselves suddenly, inexplicably essential in the spring of 2020, when they were among the only entertainment venues that could legally operate. What happened next is one of the stranger comeback stories in American cultural history.
Richard Hollingshead Jr. patents the concept and opens the first drive-in theater in Camden, New Jersey. Initial admission: 25 cents per person, one dollar per car.
Returning veterans, new families, and the rise of car culture send drive-in attendance soaring. Studios begin releasing films specifically to drive-in markets.
Drive-ins reach their all-time high. They represent nearly a quarter of all movie screens in the United States. Summer nights belong to the outdoor theater.
Rising real estate values, the VCR, cable television, and multiplex indoor theaters steadily erode attendance. Hundreds close every year. By 1990, fewer than 900 screens remain.
Roughly 300–350 drive-ins survive into the streaming era, mostly family-owned, many running double features on weekends. Critics write periodic obituaries. The theaters keep running.
When indoor venues close, drive-ins suddenly become the only option for public movie-watching. Attendance spikes. New operators enter the market. Waiting lists form for prime Saturday spots.
Several hundred drive-ins continue operating across the country, with new pop-up and seasonal venues augmenting the traditional survivors. The format has found a new generation of fans.
The drive-ins that made it through the lean decades shared a few qualities that don't show up in business school case studies. Most were family-owned and had been for two or three generations. The owners weren't optimizing for return on investment — they were maintaining something their parents or grandparents had built. That emotional accounting kept the lights on through years when the financial accounting said to close.
There's also a genuine experiential quality that streaming and multiplex theaters don't replicate: the drive-in puts you in your own environment while sharing a communal event. You can bring your dog. You can talk during the previews without bothering anyone. You can eat food you actually made, in quantities that would embarrass the snack counter. The car is both private space and communal seat, which turns out to be a combination people want, especially people with children who are still figuring out how to be quiet for two hours.
Industry observers initially assumed the 2020 surge was a one-time event — a pandemic anomaly that would fade when indoor theaters reopened. What they underestimated was the discovery effect. Millions of people attended a drive-in for the first time in 2020, including a generation that had never been to one. Many of them liked it. Not as a substitute for the indoor experience, but as its own thing.
Several things happened as a result. Pop-up and seasonal drive-ins — using parking lots, fairgrounds, and fields — began appearing in markets that hadn't had a traditional drive-in for decades. Rooftop drive-ins became fashionable in cities. The format that technology was supposed to render obsolete turned out to have a specific emotional register — nostalgic, unhurried, communal but private — that nothing else quite filled.
The drive-in teaches something worth remembering: that comfort and nostalgia and the smell of popcorn from your own bag are not trivial things. People drive forty miles for them. That's not nothing.
If you haven't been to a drive-in since childhood — or ever — a few things have changed and a few things haven't. The parking-lot speaker on a hook is mostly gone, replaced by an FM frequency you tune to on your car radio, which is both more convenient and slightly less charming. Digital projection has replaced film, which means the image is sharper and the experience of film breaking mid-feature is no longer part of the evening's entertainment.
But the basics hold. You arrive early to get a good spot. You back in so your trunk faces the screen if you're going to be outside. You eat more than you intended. The stars come out before the film does. Someone in the car next to you has a better setup than you'll ever have — blankets and a projector aimed at a sheet — and you make a note to do that someday. The film starts and the whole lot settles into that particular quiet that is not really quiet at all, because it's full of engines idling and children asking questions and the sound of other people experiencing the same thing you are, just a lane over.
The United States Drive-In Theater Directory has been maintained for years and remains the most reliable resource for finding operating venues by state. Most traditional drive-ins run Friday through Sunday nights in season; some add Thursday showings in peak summer weeks. Arrive at least thirty minutes early — spots go in order of arrival, and the front-center rows fill first.
There's a version of this story where drive-in theaters are just a curiosity — a charming relic, like rotary phones and eight-track players, kept alive by enthusiasts. That's not quite right. Drive-ins are one of the few remaining places where a large group of strangers gathers to watch the same thing at the same time in the outdoors, and the gathering is the point as much as the film is. They do something that no amount of streaming convenience can replicate: they put you in the same physical space as other people having the same experience, under the same sky.
The ones that survived the last forty years survived because the people who owned them believed that was worth something. They were right. Go find one while it's there to find.