Drive-In Theater: Difference between revisions

'''The Fall:''' Drive-ins gradually declined for a number of reasons. The real estate they used became too valuable to "waste" on a business which could operate for only a few hours a day, a few months a year, and even then was subject to bad weather. Meanwhile, audiences began turning to [[Home Video Tropes|home video]], cable or satellite TV for their movie fix, or hitting up the then-new concept of the multiplex cinema. North American motorcars had become smaller (and less comfortable) due to the various energy crises in [[The Seventies]]; the re-introduction of Daylight Savings Time as a conservation measure shifted the start time of every film an hour later. Some drive-ins responded by changing their emphasis from family fare to the [[Darker and Edgier|increasingly violent and sexually explicit]] exploitation and [[Horror Tropes|horror]] films that were, ironically, the successors to the 1950s [[B-Movie]]s. (A few drive-ins even showed outright pornography.) Another common tactic was for drive-ins to add multiple screens. Some rented their land during the day to other businesses, such as flea markets—or managed such businesses themselves. Especially in urban areas, the vast expanses of land necessary for a drive-in became too expensive to maintain, and the land was sold for redevelopment because it just wasn't financially feasible to keep it open. Therefore, many drive-ins were forced to close between [[The Seventies]] and the [[Turn of the Millennium]]. Additional closures were caused by the studios' refusal to distribute content as reels of actual movie film in the years after the turn of the millennium, which required cinemas to acquire expensive digital projectors as the feature arrived on computer hard drives. In many cases, the land was even turned over to build a shiny new multiplex cinema. It seemed that the drive-in was headed for extinction—or was it?