On a summer evening in 1932, Richard Milton Hollingshead Jr., the sales manager at his father's auto-parts company in Camden, New Jersey, propped a movie screen against two trees in his driveway. He set a 1928 Kodak projector on the hood of his car, placed a radio behind the screen for sound, and ran a series of experiments. He spaced cars at different distances. He drove through different weather conditions. He tested how to angle the cars so that everyone could see, regardless of where they parked. He even spent evenings with a garden hose, simulating rain to see how the projection would survive a drizzle. By the time he was finished, he had worked out the basic engineering of one of the most distinctive American cultural inventions of the twentieth century.
Hollingshead's idea was simple. He had a mother who hated movie theater seats. The seats were uncomfortable for larger people. The dress codes were stiff. Children misbehaved. Smoking was restricted. What if you could go to the movies in your own car, where you could sit however you wanted, dress however you wanted, smoke if you wanted, and bring your kids without worrying about them disturbing anyone? On May 16, 1933, he received U.S. Patent number 1,909,537 for his 'drive-in theater.' On June 6, less than three weeks later, he opened the world's first drive-in on Crescent Boulevard in Camden, charging twenty-five cents per car plus another twenty-five cents per person. The first feature was a comedy called 'Wives Beware,' starring Adolphe Menjou. About six hundred cars showed up.
The Camden drive-in only operated for about three years before closing — the location was poor and the technology had limitations. But the idea was viable, and within a decade other operators around the country began experimenting with their own versions. The real explosion would come after World War II, when American car ownership doubled, suburbs sprawled outward, families with children needed entertainment, and a wave of returning veterans had both the disposable income and the cultural appetite for outdoor leisure. The conditions for the drive-in's golden age were all in place by 1948, and the country was about to fall in love with one of the strangest and most beautiful entertainment formats it has ever produced.
Between 1948 and 1958, the number of drive-in theaters in the United States rose from about 800 to over 4,000. They sprouted up on the edges of every American city and town, usually on inexpensive land just outside city limits where you could fit hundreds of cars and a sixty-foot screen. The peak year was 1958, when 4,063 drive-ins operated across the country, and on any given summer Saturday night, nearly two million Americans were watching movies from their cars.
The pricing was famously generous. Most drive-ins charged by the carload, not by the person. Two dollars and fifty cents got you and however many people fit in your car — which, in the era of large American sedans, often meant six or seven people for the price of one general admission ticket at a regular theater. Families packed kids into the back seat in pajamas. Teenagers crammed friends into trunks to avoid even the carload fee. The economics were brutal for the theaters and wonderful for the customers, and they made the drive-in into a uniquely accessible form of entertainment for working-class American families.
The programming was its own art form. Most drive-ins played double features — two movies for the price of admission. The first was usually the bigger film, often a Hollywood release. The second was a B-movie: science fiction, horror, beach movies, biker films, monster movies, low-budget thrillers. The cheap second features became their own subculture, and many of the films most beloved today by midnight-movie fans got their original audiences at drive-ins. 'Attack of the 50 Foot Woman,' 'Plan 9 from Outer Space,' 'I Was a Teenage Werewolf,' the early Roger Corman films, 'Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man' — these were drive-in films, made for a drive-in audience, projected on drive-in screens.
And then there was the playground. Almost every drive-in had a small playground for children directly under or beside the screen, with swings, slides, monkey bars, and sometimes a merry-go-round. The idea was that kids could play before the show, then come back to the car when it got dark. For an entire generation of American children, the drive-in playground at dusk — running around in the warm summer air with strangers' children while the projector beam flickered overhead and the speakers crackled — became one of the most powerful childhood memories any of them had.
Sound at the drive-in went through a quiet evolution. The earliest theaters used giant speakers mounted on poles next to the screen, broadcasting sound across the entire field. This was unsatisfying — the sound was muddy, the volume dropped off in the back rows, and neighbors complained about the noise. By 1941, RCA had developed the in-car speaker: a small metal box on a long cord that hung from your driver's-side window, with a tinny speaker and a volume knob. The cord was just long enough to reach the post next to your parking spot.
The in-car speaker became the iconic technology of the drive-in. Generations of Americans hooked the speaker over the window, adjusted the volume, and watched movies through that small, distinctive sound. The speakers were also famously fragile, and by the 1970s many theaters had transitioned to broadcasting the audio over a low-power FM radio signal that played through the car stereo. The radio system was technically much better — stereo, full frequency range, no fragile equipment — but it never quite captured the same feeling. Many older drive-in fans still talk about hooking the in-car speaker on the window and rolling the window halfway up against it.
If you forgot to take the speaker off the window when you drove away — and many people did, especially after a few hours of movies and snacks — you would hear a sickening crunch as you pulled out of your spot, the speaker tearing away from the cord and dragging along the ground. The drive-in operators replaced thousands of broken speakers a year, and the sound of a freshly broken speaker cord was, for many drive-in workers, one of the most familiar noises of the job.
Drive-ins made most of their money not from ticket sales but from the concession stand. The films, especially the low-budget B-movies, were rented relatively cheaply, but the snacks at the concession stand had spectacular margins. A bucket of popcorn that cost eight cents to make sold for fifty cents. A Coca-Cola in a paper cup cost a few cents and sold for a quarter. Hot dogs, hamburgers, fries, candy, ice cream — the concession stand at a 1955 drive-in resembled a small diner more than a movie theater snack bar.
The most famous drive-in concession was the intermission cartoon, a short animated film between the two features that included scenes of dancing hot dogs, dancing popcorn boxes, and dancing soda cups, all encouraging viewers to visit the concession stand. The classic 'Let's All Go to the Lobby' jingle, with its singing snacks marching in formation, was created by an animator named Dave Fleischer for a Filmack Studios production in 1957, and it became one of the most-played pieces of music in American history simply by being shown before millions of drive-in features over decades.
The walk to the concession stand became its own ritual, especially for kids. You would get out of the car at intermission, walk through the rows of parked cars in the warm darkness, smell the popcorn from a hundred feet away, stand in a long line, order more food than you needed, and walk back balancing trays and napkins through the crowd. By the time you returned to the car, the second feature was starting, and the night had reached its perfect midpoint.
The drive-in was inseparable from the American car. The huge bench seats of 1950s and 1960s American sedans were essentially mobile living rooms, and they made the drive-in experience possible. A 1957 Chevrolet Bel Air, a 1962 Ford Galaxie, a 1965 Chevrolet Impala — these were vehicles designed for stretching out, sitting comfortably for three hours, fitting an entire family inside without anyone touching anyone else. By the time small economy cars became common in the 1980s and 1990s, the experience of the drive-in had already started to feel cramped, and the cars themselves were partly to blame.
The drive-in was also inseparable from the suburban expansion of the postwar years. Returning veterans bought houses in new subdivisions on the edges of cities. They bought cars to commute to jobs in the city. They had children, and the children needed places to go in the evenings. The drive-in fit perfectly into this geography — it was always on the edge of town, accessible only by car, and it could entertain the whole family without requiring babysitters or formal clothing or quiet behavior. The drive-in was the entertainment of the postwar suburbs, in the same way that the movie palace was the entertainment of the pre-war cities.
And of course the drive-in was famously a teenage destination. Couples on dates could find privacy that was almost impossible to get anywhere else, and teenage boys and girls who were nominally watching the movie were often paying very little attention to the screen. The drive-in's reputation as 'the passion pit' was earned and not entirely undeserved, and many baby boomers remember their first kiss, their first awkward attempt at romance, or their first time sitting in a car with someone they were nervous about, at a drive-in on a summer night.
The drive-in's slow decline began in the late 1960s and accelerated through the 1970s and 1980s. Several forces converged to kill it. The first was real estate. Many drive-ins had been built on cheap rural land just outside city limits, and as cities expanded outward in the postwar boom, that same land became worth fifty or a hundred times what it had been in 1948. By the late 1970s, the math was simple: a drive-in on twenty acres of suburban land could earn $40,000 a year as a movie theater, or it could be sold to a developer for two million dollars to build apartments or a strip mall. Most owners eventually took the developer's check.
The second force was daylight saving time. As the United States expanded daylight saving time in the 1960s and 1970s, summer evenings stayed lighter longer, which meant drive-ins could not start their movies until later — often as late as nine in the evening. Late starts meant late finishes, and a double feature that ended at 1:30 AM was not as appealing to families with young children. Attendance dropped steadily.
The third force was home video. The arrival of the VCR in the late 1970s and early 1980s meant that families could watch movies at home, on their own schedule, in their own living rooms. The drive-in's biggest selling point — the affordable, family-friendly evening of entertainment — was directly undercut by being able to rent a movie for two dollars and watch it at home with no driving required.
By 1990, the United States had fewer than 1,000 drive-ins remaining. By 2010, the number was below 400. And by 2020, only about 305 drive-ins still operated in the entire country. The format that had been one of the dominant forms of American entertainment for two decades had become a curiosity, kept alive in pockets by nostalgia and a small number of dedicated owners.
And then came 2020. When the pandemic shut down indoor movie theaters across the country, the drive-in suddenly looked like the perfect entertainment format for an era of social distancing. Cars provided built-in separation between groups. Outdoor air dramatically reduced viral transmission risk. Concessions could be ordered through windows. The remaining drive-ins saw their first sold-out summers in decades, and several closed locations were temporarily reopened to meet the demand.
More surprising, new drive-ins started opening for the first time in decades. Pop-up drive-ins appeared in parking lots of stadiums, malls, and convention centers. Permanent new drive-ins opened in places they had not existed in forty years. By 2024, the number of operating drive-ins in the United States had stabilized around 305 to 325, with several new ones opening each year — not enough to threaten the postwar peak, but the first sustained growth the format had seen in the lifetimes of most of its current customers.
The drive-ins that have survived and thrived in this new era have learned to be more than movie theaters. Many now serve as concert venues, swap meets, weekend markets, food truck rallies, and community gathering spaces. The screen is the centerpiece, but the experience is broader than just the movie. Some have updated their sound systems, expanded their concession menus, added craft beer (where local laws allow), and built playgrounds that look more like the ones at the height of the 1950s drive-in than like the abandoned structures most people remember from the decline years.
If you have not been to a drive-in in twenty years and you live within driving distance of one, this is the year to go back. Take a few people you love. Bring a blanket and some pillows. Order more food than you need from the concession stand. Stay for the second feature even if you are tired. The experience that was almost lost is being kept alive by a small number of dedicated operators, and the most powerful thing you can do for it is to show up. And the night you spend doing it will be one of the most distinctive, most American, most strangely moving things you do all summer.
