On June 6, 1933, a New Jersey auto-parts salesman named Richard Hollingshead opened a movie theater in his own backyard, then took the idea commercial in Camden. He’d nailed a screen between two trees, propped a projector on the hood of his car, and figured out that a ramp system could tilt cars at just the right angle so nobody’s view got blocked by the vehicle in front. Admission to that first drive-in ran 25 cents per car plus a quarter a head, and the opening-night feature was a British comedy called Wives Beware. Twenty-five years later, Hollingshead’s backyard experiment had multiplied into a genuine American institution — and then it started disappearing almost as fast as it had spread.

From One Screen to Over 4,000

Hollingshead patented his drive-in design in May 1933, and for the first decade the format grew slowly — the tinny speaker boxes hadn’t been invented yet, so early drive-ins relied on speakers mounted near the screen, which made for a muddy soundtrack if you weren’t parked up front. That changed in the early 1940s with the introduction of individual in-car speakers, and drive-ins took off. According to Smithsonian Magazine’s history of the format, the drive-in boom crested in 1958, when roughly 4,063 drive-in theaters were operating across the United States. That’s not a niche curiosity — that’s thousands of screens, from Maine to California, built on cheap land at the edge of town where a family could pile into the station wagon, pay by the carload, and watch a double feature in pajamas.

Why the Boom Didn’t Last

The drive-in’s decline wasn’t caused by one single villain — it was two slow-moving problems that eventually caught up with the business model. First, scheduling: indoor theaters could run a first-run film five or six times a day, while a drive-in, dependent on darkness, only got one nightly showing. That meant studios increasingly favored indoor houses for premiere bookings, leaving drive-ins to play films after their first run had already cooled off. Second, and more decisive, was real estate. Drive-ins were built cheaply on undeveloped land at a city’s outskirts — and as Smithsonian’s follow-up reporting notes, quoting longtime drive-in owner D. Vogel, “people would build on the outskirts of town, and the town would grow.” The empty lots that made drive-ins possible in 1950 became prime shopping-center and subdivision real estate by the 1970s and ’80s, and selling the land was often worth more than running the business. Many drive-ins were also family operations, and when the founding generation retired, their kids frequently chose not to take over a business that ran seasonally, at night, and only in decent weather.

What’s Left Today

From that 1958 peak of over 4,000, the United States is now down to roughly 400 operating drive-ins, with about 100 more scattered across Canada, Australia, and elsewhere, per Smithsonian’s count. That’s less than a tenth of what existed at the format’s high point — a steeper collapse than almost any other mid-century American retail category. The ones that survived tend to share a few traits: they’re in areas where land never got expensive enough to sell out from under them, they’ve diversified into swap meets or flea markets during daylight hours, and they’ve leaned hard into the nostalgia angle that once was just… Tuesday night.

The Survivors Aren’t Random

The drive-ins still operating today tend to cluster in places where land pressure never caught up — rural counties, small towns, and regions where a twenty-acre lot on the edge of town in 1955 is still, more or less, the edge of town today. Some of the oldest survivors have leaned into exactly that: running as swap meets, flea markets, or farmers’ markets during daylight hours and switching over to movie screens after dark, effectively running two businesses out of one piece of real estate to make the economics work in a way a single nightly showing never could on its own. It’s less a triumph of nostalgia than a fairly practical adaptation to the same land-value math that killed off the majority of the format in the first place.

A Late-Summer Ritual, If You Can Find One

There’s a reason drive-ins still cluster their busiest nights around Memorial Day, the Fourth of July, and Labor Day weekend — warm nights, school schedules, and a decades-old association between summer and watching a movie through a windshield haven’t gone anywhere, even if the theaters mostly have. If there’s one within driving distance this weekend, it’s operating against odds that would have seemed unthinkable to Richard Hollingshead’s generation, who couldn’t have imagined a format this popular ever needing defending. The pajamas-in-the-back-seat, radio-tuned-to-the-movie experience isn’t gone. It’s just gotten a lot harder to find.