The drive-in movie theatre is not necessarily dead, but it’s certainly not quite alive either. There are some scattered around – including in Saskatchewan – but they have been increasingly rare. The only drive-in I’ve ever been to is now a bus parking lot, though I also know of one that’s an overgrown empty lot. They stopped being popular, or at least they stopped being popular enough to justify the amount of real estate required to operate one.
There is a man in Saskatoon who believes they are prime for a revival. He’s 91 year-old Duffy Besenski, and he also operated both the bus parking lot and over-grown empty lot, so he has ties to the industry. He believes they’re prime for a revival and wants to get out of retirement and build a new one in Saskatoon. I find myself hoping that he manages it, while admitting it’s a tricky proposition.
A drive-in is going to be a niche market proposition, but I do think they can succeed provided that there are not very many out there. The rarity of a drive-in is part of the reason why you would want to go to one in 2016. They’re an experience you can’t really get anywhere else, and if you have to make a trek out to Wolseley to get it – as you can do this summer at the Twilite Drive-In – then that further pushes that niche appeal. It turns the movies into an event, because it’s part of a larger road trip to get entertainment. Whatever the appeal of the drive-in was back in the day, the appeal now is that it’s a rare thing, you’ve got to go out of your way to have that experience.
Of course, one could have many theories as to why drive-in theatres mostly died. Some could argue that regular theatres had better sound quality, others that the lack of bench seats in modern cars meant that some of the more intimate aspects of the drive-in experience were lost. Given the nature of the medium, they are hard to make profitable, since a drive-in can’t screen movies all day while regular theatres don’t have that limitation. Plus, the expense of keeping up with modern standards had to hurt. While struggling long before digital came in, that was the death blow for a lot of the smaller operations, the sheer expense of the switch over being impossible to justify – it didn’t help smaller rural theatres either, of course.
The majority of drive-ins dying off has been the savior to the ones that remain in operation, because all of the drive-ins that survived that decline can survive simply by being the only drive-ins. There’s just enough market for them to be viable businesses, because they’re the only places that can provide that experience. If anything, it’s enhanced the experience, because it’s not something you can do every day, going to the drive-in takes more planning than just going to the movies, and that’s part of the whole experience. You go to the drive-in because it’s something you can’t do every day.
There are some other perks as well. The relative isolation of your own car takes out audience distractions such as the monsters who play with their cell phones in the theatre or have loud conversations. There’s a chance for a cool breeze through the car or the light of the stars through a sunroof, which you can’t get with any regular theatre. If the movie happens to be awful, such as if you made the mistake of watching Batman V Superman, you can turn off the audio and make up your own story.
It also allows for programming opportunities. Given that the drive-in experience is already associated with nostalgia, anyone wanting to set up a program of old movies is going to have a venue that fits the type of film they want to see. If a filmmaker is doing a homage to something classic, they should consider doing an opening at a drive-in, because it’d be a better fit with the type of film they are making. It’s not a great venue for first run movies, because they tend to be expensive and require more admissions to justify, but a creative operator could do all sorts of drive-in centric programming that gets people to make the trek to their theatre, and when they’re based in a small town, they could push to make it a tourist draw.
But can a new drive-in actually make it in Saskatchewan? The man in this case has managed to make it work before, but then he did it in a much different time, even if he did it in the same place. The cost of operation has only increased, whether that’s the cost of the land and the associated taxes, the cost of projection equipment or the cost of getting movies themselves – digital projection might have fewer moving parts than using film, but it’s not exactly cheaper. It’s also much less novel to go to Saskatoon, even if they have a much bigger population base than the smaller towns that still have managed to keep the drive-ins alive, which might reduce the novelty of the format, one of the things that keep it going. I don’t know if he will succeed, but for the sake of novelty, I hope he does.
