Category Archives: Missouri

Meet the final (?) four winners of Project Drive-In

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Today, Honda announced four more winners of its Project Drive-In contest to award digital projection systems. The latest lucky drive-ins include:

Ocala Drive-In, Ocala FL, the only Florida entrant in the contest.

Starlite Drive-In, Cadet MO, which somehow escaped our seemingly exhaustive four-part list of news stories about the candidates.

Monetta Drive-In, Monetta SC, The Big MO.

StateLine Drive-In, Elizabethton TN, sorry that I misspelled StateLine as two words during the project round-up.

So far Honda hasn’t taken my forwarded suggestion to finance the 140+ other drive-ins that still need digital equipment, but it is extending its fundraiser through the end of 2013. I think that local fundraisers stand a lot better chance of success than this national effort, but what do I know?

Here’s one more way to help. Honda has donated a 2014 Odyssey Touring Elite as an incentive on the Project Drive-In fundraising page. (You’ll need to scroll way down to the bottom of the page to see it.) If you make a $50,000 donation, you get the brand new Odyssey minivan, and you get the warm feeling of knowing that you help fund an additional digital projector to save another drive-in from closing. Plus you get your name in Honda’s next drive-in video. If you were planning on buying one of these anyway, why not do it here?

Project Drive-In roundup 2, The Sequel

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In my last post, I began the task of listing every local media report of every local drive-in that’s participating in Honda’s Project Drive-In. Foolishly, I thought that I might gather up all of them in one sitting. When I hit 20 theaters, each with a similar tale of tenuous finance and this lottery-ticket hope for survival, my eyes had glazed over, and I barely had the strength to finish off the post and click Publish.

Two days later, I’m ready again to see how many more drive-in reports I can list. Again, they’re alphabetized by state. And again, if you click through and find a particularly cool detail we should all know about, please leave a comment.

More of your candidates:

Whew again! That’s 20 more drive-ins with local coverage of their Project Drive-In eligibility. I don’t know whether there are 20 more that I haven’t mentioned, but if I spot enough new ones, there may be a third episode of this franchise.

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.