Category Archives: Kansas

Project Drive-In roundup 3: Dark of the screen

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I warned you that it might come to this. With less than a week left in Honda’s Project Drive-In voting period, I’ve found media reports about a few more of the candidates.

Here’s something confusing: Some of those media reports only partially duplicate other reports. That is, if a new story lists drive-ins A, B, and C, but a story from one of my first two round-ups already mentioned A and C, then I’ve added B as a new candidate in this third round-up. If you click through to the story, it’ll mention all three, but we know that B is the only one that’s new to this list. Okay?

With that in mind, let’s go through a few more:

And that should hold us on Project Drive-In news until they start talking about winners. Wouldn’t it be nice if Honda chose more than five?

Kansas Star Vu hopes Honda will bring it back to life

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Here’s a slightly different angle on Honda’s Project Drive-In promotion. Of the drive-in theaters on its ballot to receive a new digital projector, almost all of them are still operating. Here’s a story about the Star Vu (El Dorado KS), which pretty much closed last year but hopes to reopen if it can be one of Honda’s winners.

The report from KAKE, Wichita’s News Leader, says it all. The Star Vu folks report that fundraising has been slow, with only about $2000 contributed toward the conversion effort. The theater shows films once in a while on special benefit nights; I think they’d be smart to book more classic films to bring in more cash at the box office and concession stand, and to remind patrons what they’ll be missing if the Star Vu can’t turn the corner.

Of course, we love the opportunity to get more video of drive-ins are they are today, even when they’re sort of closed. KAKE’s article that accompanies the video report isn’t just a transcription, so you might want to go read it!

Kansas City’s I-70 faces uncertain future

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I-70 Drive-In Theater signThe Kansas City (MO) Business Journal ran a nice long article yesterday talking about the drive-in theater situation in the KC metropolitan area. Business is booming at all three surviving drive-ins, but two of them are facing the decision on whether to go digital or close when film runs out. Those two, Kansas City’s I-70 and the Twin in Independence MO, are both owned by Darryl Smith.

The article doesn’t mention this, but before Smith’s time, the I-70 was one of the first drive-ins to carve up its lot to add extra screens to give patrons more choices. Now they’re seeing the downside of having so many projectors; to replace the four at the I-70 plus the pair at the Twin will cost the better part of a half million dollars.

That decision would be easy if business was drying up, but instead, “July sales for the I-70 Drive-In were close to twice what they’d averaged over the last five years.” But will that be enough to cover such a huge expense? Smith is hoping that Honda’s Project Drive-In will tip the answer his way; the I-70 is one of the drive-ins competing for votes to win a new digital projector.

The KC Business Journal story included a fun side note about the Boulevard across the border in Kansas City KS. Not only was it an early converter to digital, the Boulevard claims to be the first drive-in to install a 4K projector. Since it was installed over a year ago, “attendance has shot through the roof, similar to the figures drive-in theaters reached in the 1960s. … The projector has more than paid for itself, even though the theater operates only Thursday through Sunday from April to October.” Let’s hope that Smith reads that part of the story and finds the cash to keep his drive-ins running for decades to come.