Category Archives: West Virginia

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.

Project Drive-In roundup

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I’ll admit it. I’ve been so overwhelmed by the local media coverage of Honda’s Project Drive-In that it’s been hard to write. On one hand, I don’t especially want you to vote for some Florida drive-in over one on Ohio or vice versa. Heck, I’ve even noticed that Honda has added at least a couple drive-ins (such as the Apache) that weren’t there when voting started.

There are only so many ways I can spin the local news when it says that nearby drive-in X needs to convert to digital projection, and its best / only hope is if it is one of the Project Drive-In winners. So I’m just going to gather them all a bunch of them in this list. There are probably lots of interesting, fresh details here and there about each drive-in, but I’m going to let you discover them. If you find something sufficiently cool, post a comment about it, will you please?

Your candidates, alphabetized by state:

Whew! That’s 20 theaters so far. I’ll see how many more I can round up for our next installment.

Drive-in success story: Become a popular restaurant

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Maybe this is cheating a bit, but this news report is a great illustration of an idea that more drive-ins should use. It’s from WBOY, Clarksburg WV’s news leader, and it’s all about the Ellis Restaurant on US 19 south of Shinnston. As much as we like restaurants, the only reason we care about this story is that the Ellis started as the snack shack for the adjacent Sunset Drive-In Theater, which is still operating. You can see both the restaurant and the screen in the Google Street View image embedded below. (It might help to zoom in a little.)

Anyway, this just shows that a great way to make a drive-in profitable is to make its restaurant popular all day and all year round. Since most of the ticket money goes to distributors, what’s left makes the business model of a drive-in theater look more like a seasonal, evening-only restaurant. So find a way to make that food wonderful (it often is) and find a way to make it convenient to buy even when the movies aren’t showing. If you can manage that, your place may be as successful as the Ellis, where the Sunset is reduced to second billing.

Update: Just after I posted this, I noticed that WBOY also ran a story about the Sunset, and they posted a video of that too. Too much multimedia for one story? Leave a comment and let me know. View Larger Map