Surprisingly (at least to me) this isn’t true. For some reason, drive-ins are doing much better in the north than in the south. I would have expected the opposite due to the loss of the winter viewing season.
Alabama has only nine operating drive-in theatres. Arizona has 5; Florida has 19; Georgia has 5; Louisiana has none; Mississippi has 4; New Mexico has 2; South Carolina has 3; and Texas has 13.
Meanwhile Illinois has 20 operating drive-in theatres; Indiana has 31; New York has 33; Ohio has 48; Pennsylvania has 36; and Washington has 13. Even Manitoba has 5.
Granted these are old figures from 1999. But I know for a fact, there are still operating drive-ins in my area.
I suspect people in the South have gotten used to air conditioning and feel it’s too it’s too hot to sit in a car and watch a movie in the summer. Summer evenings in the North can be cool.
I don’t believe so. As the data in Fubaya’s post shows, theaters were declining well before the home video boom of the 80’s. While it may have contributed to the death blow, the factors I listed continue to close multiplexes and small theaters today.
My theory is that kids want to get out of the house and away from their parents on weekends, but they can’t go to bars and nightclubs yet. So, they go to multiplexes not because they want to see a particular movie, but to see any movie. This is why the teen/children films tend to dominate, and the fairly recent enforcement of the R-rating has hurt a lot of films. Directors today feel forced to cut their films down to avoid the R-rating, because they just can’t generate decent numbers with it.
OK, this is just a personal anecdote, but the last time I ever set foot in a movie theater was the week before I got my first VCR, and I never plan to go in one again. I suspect there are others who have made a similar transition in entertainment.
Did drive-ins in the 50s and 60s typically show first run, big name movies? There is a drive in in Auburn, Washington (about 25 miles from Seattle) that airs all the first run movies a week after they open in indoor theaters.
FYI, an article in tomorrow’s New York Times attributes the decline in drive-in theaters to daylight saving time, at least in part. It says, “The drive-in obituary has been written repeatedly, for what seem to be good reasons. The first drive-in opened in 1933 in New Jersey, and about 4,000 were operating by the late 1950s, but a changing America found new leisure-time loves. The solidification of daylight saving time in the 1960s contributed to the drive-in’s downfall, forcing later starting times. Widespread sales of color televisions hurt, too. Later, the VCR and multiplexes — called hardtops in movie theater parlance — took a toll. And real estate development is a continuing threat.”