Movie lovers are racing to drive-ins amid pandemic
Drive-in theatres across North America experiencing a pandemic-era renaissance
When the Circle Drive-in opened in April of 1951 on California’s Pacific Coast Highway, the full-page advertisement in the local paper listed all the benefits of attending. “Come as you are!” it crowed. “Enjoy smoking! No babysitter problem!” And then this: “Be flu and polio protected!”
California was in the midst of a polio outbreak that would spread across the United States the following year, killing more than 3,000 people and disabling more than 21,000 others. A vaccine wouldn’t be announced until 1955, so until then the only way to avoid infection was to stay away from others. To do that and still take in a movie, drive-ins were the way to go.
Almost 70 years later, Americans in the grip of the COVID-19 pandemic are again discovering the joys of drive-in movies. While traditional cinemas remain shuttered for the foreseeable future, driveins are experiencing a renaissance.
This in spite of the fact that there are no new major releases to show on their screens. Part of the reason AMC is keeping its cinemas closed in the U.S. is that so many blockbusters have delayed their openings.
The James Bond thriller No Time to Die, originally set to open in April, is now a November release. Disney’s Artemis Fowl moved from its original May 29 release date to the studio’s streaming service June 12. Wonder Woman 1984 has been pushed from June 5 to Aug. 14, while fellow female superhero Black Widow went from May 1 to Nov. 6. And Pixar’s Soul, originally slated to open June 19, now comes out Nov. 20.
The next big feature on the calendar is Christopher Nolan’s highly anticipated Tenet, a science-fiction thriller with a time-travel twist. It’s set to open July 17, followed a week later by the delayed release of Disney’s Mulan.
But drive-in audiences are racing to see older movies on the big screen. The Showboat Drive-in in Hockley, Texas, recently saw a 95 per cent increase in sales in the second week that it showed Pixar’s Onward and the horror film
The Invisible Man, even though both titles are available online.
It’s the same story across the country. In Ocala, Fla., it’s Trolls World Tour followed by Back to the Future on one screen, and True History of the Kelly Gang and Resistance on the other. And out in Sacramento, Calif., the West Wind’s six screens include a Will Smith double feature of Bad Boys for Life and Gemini Man, and the recent DC movies Joker and Birds of Prey.
Canada, with its cooler climate and more stringent lockdown laws, would seem to be behind the curve on the drive-in front. But on March 18, the small town of Redcliff in southern Alberta hosted an outdoor movie night in the parking lot of the local aquatic centre, with Jumanji: The Next Level on an inflatable screen, followed by the First World War movie 1917.
Town councillor and local businessman Chris Czember says he copied the idea from the nearby town of Brooks, which had to cancel its plans after the COVID-19 outbreak worsened there. He’s quick to note that he would have cancelled too if there had been any safety concerns. “The idea was to have a COVID -friendly event,” he says. “If it’s rampant, then a COVID -friendly event is staying home.”
Redcliff’s event had no concessions, no bathrooms, no cost, no open windows and no one sharing vehicles except family members who were already living together. Czember estimates they had about 350 cars for the first feature, and an additional 50 or so for the second — this in a town of just 5,600 people.
In Ontario, which this week announced a somewhat vague, nodates-attached plan for a return to normalcy, Brian Allen is excited to get his drive-ins back to business. He’s president of Premier Operating, which runs drive-in theatres in London, Barrie, Newmarket, Hamilton and Oakville, along with one traditional cinema up in Yellowknife.
“Such a great irony here,” he says of the resurgence of interest in the drive-in as a way to see movies. “Everyone always talks about the demise of the drive-in. I’ve always thought they were relevant. Last year was one of our best years.”
His 2020 season lasted exactly one day before the provincial lockdown forced him to close. “But there’s a good chance that the drive-ins will open before the indoor theatres,” he says.
He’s already thinking of possible programming. “Every year I do the double bill of E.T. and Back to the Future,” he says. “We’re also going to try to bring back a lot of the John Hughes movies.”
And this third-generation exhibitor has strong ideas about what works and what doesn’t at the drive-in. “I’m better off playing Austin Powers than Harry Potter,” he says, noting that anything within the comedy-family-action triangle is gold, whereas titles that are too literary or “too sci-fi” don’t play as well. It’s also hard to please everyone in a time when a survey of U.S. drive-ins finds some almost defiantly open, others apologetically shut, and a few that opened briefly only to close down again.
In Canada, Quebec City is looking into the possibility of opening up to three not-for-profit drive-ins by the end of June. And in Prince George in central British Columbia, the Park Drive-in is planning to limit screenings to one per night to reduce the number of attendees and the need for bathroom breaks.
“This is the year of the drive-in,” Park co-owner Nina Keba told the CBC in a recent interview. “I think we’re going back.”
She might be overstating things just a little. Drive-ins reached their peak in the 1950s, when the U.S. was home to about 4,000 such theatres. Those numbers have since fallen to a little more than 300. Canada, with the second largest number of drive-ins in the world, has fewer than 40.
And despite keeping its patrons flu- and polio-free for decades, the Circle Drive-in of California finally succumbed to the rise of television and VHS rentals in 1985. It went dark on Jan. 31 of that year. Its last screening was a low-budget made-in-italy science-fiction adventure called 2019: The Fall of New York.
It’s tempting to imagine that the Circle’s final words were a warning to the future, a reminder of what the drive-in could offer, and of what their disappearance might mean.