photo by MichiganDriveIns, used by permission

MLive.com reported recently that the US-23 Drive-In (Flint MI) reopened for another season last Friday. General manager Johny Thomas says that the US-23 will be fully converted to digital projection on its three screens by the first of July, and according to MLive, Thomas has a novel method of paying for all those new projectors. He’s raised ticket prices by $1 per person this year.

The story also includes an 11-photo gallery of 2012 opening day photos from The Flint Journal. (I love the photo of the really big popcorn popper.) So go check it out!

Ticket booth at the Capri Drive-In.
Photo by All Things Michigan.

The MLive Media Group, which includes a bunch of newspapers in Michigan, published a set of stories over the weekend about the state of southwest Michigan drive-ins. Glenda and Neal Edwards own two of them, the 5 Mile of Dowagiac and the Sunset in Hartford, and they’re hoping to get films for the rest of this summer while they save to convert at least one of their drive-ins to digital projection. “We’ll do it for as long as we can hold on, as long as we can get prints,” Glenda Edwards said. They say it’s possible that they’ll have to close one or both drive-ins.

Meanwhile, the Capri of Coldwater made the change just a week or two ago, according to The Daily Reporter. Its owners, Susan and Tom Magocs, wanted to let their patrons know that “the Capri will still be here.” MLive reports that the cost to convert the two projectors was $144,000, and those funds came from selling their lake house.

MLive also has a five-photo slide show of the three drive-ins, so you probably really ought to go read it!

There are too many details and quotes and neat stuff about the US 23 Drive-In (Flint MI) from this Flint Journal article for me to summarize, so you ought to go read it. The 23’s general manager said the biggest draw of the summer was Ice Age 4, partly because it came out when he was running more than just weekends.

But don’t think the relentless need for improvement has overlooked the 23. They plan to add fountain soda machines, because customers have been asking for them. Yeah, I remember when the old Comanche (Buena Vista CO) was open, it just had a cooler full of soda cans. Not nearly as nice. Good luck, 23, and please get the kind of machine that dispenses crushed ice.