Our local drive-in shows double-features for only seven bucks a head. Not seven bucks for each movie, seven dollars per person total. These are first run movies, premiering at the same time as the regular theater (tonight we’re going to see Pirates 3 and Wild Hogs, both have been there for a while).
Not only that, but Thursday nights are their “discount” nights, where it’s only five a person. And the snack bar? Besides killer mozzarella sticks, they have the whole gamut of snacks, all for ridiculously normal prices—as in, a buck fifty or so for a soda, not the three dollars per kernel of popcorn you get at the theater.
So, what gives? I thought theaters charged an arm and a leg due to the high cost of showing films—do drive-ins hold a special place in distributor’s hearts and get a huge discount? Is the price difference in tickets and popcorn just to cover the cost of heating/cooling and ushers? Even adding up the amenities, there’s still a HUGE difference—five bucks for two movies?
Or have I found a small time-portal back to the seventies?
From what I understand, the theaters, be they drive in or shoebox, rent the first run movies. The cost would be the same for both. The difference is that drive ins can get more people in and may only show one or two movies a night. The multiplex shows about 10 movies a night and must pay for all of them. Drive ins also would have a lower overhead. They don’t have to provide A/C, heat, parking :smack: , well things like that. So the drive in saves money and passes the savings on to you.
I would imagine the finances don’t work to well, as almost all of the drive-ins have dissappeared around here. It might be different in places have have summer weather year round.
Yeah, but the drive-in doesn’t seem to be nearly as packed as the theater… and by only showing once they lose out on volume.
Come to think about it, maybe my question doesn’t stem from drive-in finances as much as questioning what I’ve heard about movies charging outrageous ticket and concession prices due to the high cost of ‘renting’ the films.
Movie theaters pay a percentage of their grosses to the studios for permission to show those films. Since everybody wants the hottest blockbusters, the studios can demand an enormous share of the gross for the first weekend, when everybody wants to go. For the biggest films, that’s 90%.
That’s why theaters have to make their money on concessions. They’re making next to nothing on ticket sales.
The percentage goes down as the weeks go by, more toward 50%. And films that aren’t blockbusters also won’t command more than about 50%. Even so, the studios take more of the overall ticket grosses than the theaters do.
A drive-in gets first run films, but probably only after the first weekend rush is over. So they pay out less of a percentage of their gross. They still have to make their money on concessions. That $1.50 for a soda costs them maybe ten cents.
They make up the rest in lower overhead, fewer staffers, lower rents and taxes and all the rest. Do they make as much as a good indoor theater? No. They make something. For most people that something isn’t enough, which is why 90% of drive-ins closed down. For the rest that something is enough to keep them going.
The Ford-Wyoming here is still around. I think it’s one of the last three or four drive-ins in Michigan, though, and definitely the last one in my neck of the woods (in SE Michigan, 1/2 hour drive qualifies as one’s neck of the woods).
Our local drive-in seems to be quite successful and it has two big screens plus hundreds and hundreds of parking spaces. They charge $20 PER CAR for a double-feature. Over Memorial Day weekend, I noticed that one double feature was Shrek 3 and Spiderman 3. Since I have a baby and another young daughter, I thought watching in from my SUV would be the ideal solution. I knew we had to leave early so we planned onb getting there am hour ahead of time. Driving through a couple of towns that lead to it on two-lane roads, I got relly frustrated when we were about 5 miles away. I saw police coming by so I figured that there had been an accident and we would pass it shortly. I was very wrong, most of the traffic for the next 5 miles was for the drive-in and the police had to do some quick work of notifying people that the movie was sold out way ahead of time and then figuring out how to get all those people including us turned around and headed home.
We did see those movies the next weekend although the whole drive-in megaplex was sold out then too. This one also has a giant indoor concession stand with way more stuff than a typical movie theater. I wondered how they make money as well especially by being open only 6 months a year but it seems to work. The odd thing is that their concession stand is much cheaper than a regular movie theater as well but they do high volume.
That’s one of the things that made me wonder if there was a different fee structure for drive-ins. I’ve always heard it was the cost of getting the movies that meant high concession prices – in fact, when going to places like the Uptown in DC, I thought it a good thing to hit the stand (well, besides the popcorn) because that was the only way they were making money, and the world NEEDS places like the Uptown.
But… but… but two of us can see two movies and get fed junk food for under twenty bucks. The same thing would run to fifty or so bucks in a regular theater.
So it still strikes me that either A) the whole “we have to charge ten dollars for popcorn because the evil distributors charge so much for the film” is hokum, or there’s something else going on (besides smaller electric bills).
Growing up we used to go regularly during the summer. We lost our local drive-in when the land was annexed by the city (real estate costs and taxes) making it too expensive. But the owner probably made a killing by selling the land to investors (and retiring with a pretty penny).
Today, the land is crappy strip malls and impersonal small office buildings. The folks who live and work there now have no idea of the history under their feet …
I’ve wondered this, too. Our local drive-in charges $5 a head and could care less if you stay (against the rules) for another movie after. They run a huuuge ‘swap shop’ on the weekends and Wednesdays, though, where the vendors have to pay to set up booths. I always figured other drive-ins ran similar ventures to make extra money.
Their overhead is probably low, also. I overheard a guy at a used tire shop a few months ago bragging to his buddy about how he was moonlighting as the new manager of the drive-in and they were paying him a whole $10 an hour. Not making fun of low wage earners, but it did help me to understand how they keep costs down.
As an aside, does anyone else notice a trend towards white trashiness at drive-ins? I’m having trouble getting my wife to go to them anymore with me because the sight of so many kids getting their asses kicked by drunk parents is starting to upset her.
Granted, it was many years ago (30 maybe) that someone said to me, “I’ll build you a chain of theatres and let you run the movie part of it but the only condition is that I get the revenue from the concessions.”
One of the attractions of going to the drive-in when I was a kid was that we weren’t forced to use the concessions. We made our own popcorn and put it into brown grocercy bag; we’d bring our own soda-pop; and we’d bring other good snacks. Of course being kids, the adults often conceded and let us get a foot-long and/or some ice cream. My first knowledge of what tailgating is wasn’t from sports venues, but from other people coming to the drive in with their hibachis and such.
Ah…the drive-in. Scenes from the sexual awakening of so many of us during the 60s and 70s.
You go into the drive-in, find a place to park
You hop into the backseat where you know it’s nice and dark
You’re just about to move and you’re thinking it’s a breeze
There’s a light in your eyes and then a guy says
“Out of the car, longhair!”
Oowee, you’re comin’ with me, call the police
Economics generally tells us that prices are not set based on the cost of inputs. The fact is that a lot of people are willing to pay the prices regular movie theaters charge, for tickets and concessions. Drive-ins would no doubt charge those prices if they could. The fact that there are so few drive-ins today seems to indicate that the finances don’t work out terribly well. From observation, it seems that most places that can supply drive-in movies have very low land costs. Also, they are likely small businesses that may not even be making a real profit.
