The 99W down in Newberg opens for the season in a few weeks, and I have already told two people I am going, which for me is a binding contract. I went last August. Sat in a folding chair in front of my car with a thermos of Stumptown that had gone cold hours earlier, watching a movie I would have half-ignored at home.
I did not look at my phone once. Not out of discipline. There was simply nothing more interesting happening in my hand than on a screen the size of a barn.
Drive-ins keep getting written up as nostalgia plays, and that framing is lazy.
The drive-in is not surviving because it reminds anyone of 1962. It is surviving because it happens to solve three problems the modern theater created.
One, it prices by the car. A family of five is one ticket, which turns an evening out from a math problem back into a decision.
Two, it is loud in the right way. You can talk. Kids can be kids. The social contract of a dark indoor theater, sit still, say nothing, unwrap that candy in slow motion, is exactly the contract that makes people stay home in the first place.
Three, the format is honest about what it is. Nobody arrives at a drive-in expecting recliners and Dolby. The offer is a field, a screen, a radio signal, and weather. Expectations set that clearly are almost impossible to disappoint.
This is what I keep trying to get across to brands convinced their category has moved past them. Old is not the same as obsolete. Formats do not die of age, they die of mismatch, and mismatch runs in both directions. Print magazines are creeping back for the same reason. Vinyl too. Not because the past was better, but because the constraints of the old format happen to line up with something people are short on right now.
Formats do not die of age, they die of mismatch, and mismatch runs in both directions.
So if you run a brand with something dusty in the archive, do not relaunch it as a wink. Nostalgia is a first date, not a relationship. Ask instead what the old thing was structurally good at, and whether that thing has become scarce. The scarcity is the entire argument. The retro packaging is just what you put on it afterward.
I said most of this at karaoke on Thursday to a man waiting his turn on a machine that has looked broken since 2011. He told me the drive-in has the same appeal this bar does: you can be there badly and nobody minds. Then he went up, sang flat for six straight minutes, and got applause from every table.