UPDATE (Tuesday, September 8th, 1:00pm): Due to the overwhelming success of the Sony Drive-In Experience, Sony will also be showing The Broken Hearts Gallery on the Thalberg lot from Thursday, September 10 through Wednesday, September 16th and has added showings for more movies. Get tickets here and see the updated calendar below.
With the coronavirus pandemic continuing to keep traditional movie theaters closed in parts of the country, drive-in theaters have had themselves a comeback. Sony Pictures is joining in on the fun and becoming the first studio to offer a dual-screen pop-up drive-in experience at their studio lot in Culver City – and Atom Tickets is their official ticketing partner.
Held in the studio’s Thalberg parking lot, the pop-up experience begins on Friday, August 14th and will show a number of titles from Sony’s library, with the schedule as follows:
AUGUST
8/14 Grown Ups
8/15 The Karate Kid (1984)
8/16 Ghostbusters (1984)
8/21 Bloodshot
8/22 Don’t Breathe
8/23 Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood
8/28 Spider-Man: Homecoming
8/29 Spider-Man: Far From Home
8/30 Baby Driver
SEPTEMBER
9/4 Men in Black (1997)
9/5 Bad Boys for Life
9/6 Jumanji: The Next Level
9/9 Ghostbusters (1984)
9/10 The Broken Hearts Gallery
9/11 The Broken Hearts Gallery
9/12 The Broken Hearts Gallery
9/13 The Broken Hearts Gallery
9/14 The Broken Hearts Gallery
9/15 The Broken Hearts Gallery
9/16 The Broken Hearts Gallery
9/19 Surf’s Up
9/20 Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs
9/22 Akira
9/25 Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse
9/26 Hotel Transylvania
In addition, rather than having a traditional movie premiere, Selena Gomez-produced The Broken Hearts Gallery will host its first screening at the Sony space.
Porsche Cars North America is also a sponsor and will be on-hand to show off its first all-electric sports car, the Taycan, as well as the Cayenne Coupe.
Movies will be shown Friday, Saturday and Sunday nights beginning at 8:00pm and the total price will be $30 per car ($25 ticket + $5 convenience fee) for a max total of 75 cars in the Sony lot. You can check listings and get tickets here.
In honor of this fun, first-of-its-kind studio experience, here are our seven favorite movie scenes set at the drive-in.
1. Grease (1978)
If you’ve seen Grease, then you understand that, as beloved as it is, it, uh, hasn’t aged well. The drive-in scene is a perfect example of why it’s so beloved and also so cringey at times. Greaser “bad boy” Danny Zuko (John Travolta) has finally gotten the sweet and proper Sandy (Olivia Newton-John) to go on a date with him to the drive-in. Sandy is there for the movie, but Danny has other plans and he tries to make a move on Sandy during the movie. Sandy, however, is having none of it and slaps his hands away before rightfully ditching him in a huff, leaving Danny Zuko to sing about his confusion and what the other guys at school will say to him.
I dunno, Danny. Why did she leave you high and dry? Think about it…you’ll get there.
2. The Outsiders (1983)
Speaking of ’50s greasers and teenage boys’ fuzzy concepts of respect is this scene from Francis Ford Coppola’s The Outsiders, the classic coming-of-age book turned classic coming-of-age movie for kids of the ’80s and ’90s. It featured an all-star cast of the hottest up-and-coming actors of the decade: Patrick Swayze, Tom Cruise, Matt Dillon, Ralph Macchio, Rob Lowe, Emilio Estevez, C. Thomas Howell and Diane Lane. The opening scene of the movie shows the Outsiders sneaking into a drive-in. It quickly establishes their personalities: Dallas (Dillon), the hardened and sometimes violent budding criminal; sensitive and anxious Johnny (Macchio); thoughtful baby brother Pony Boy (Howell); wisecracking and irreverent prankster Two-Bit (Estevez); and feisty and outspoken Soc prep, Cherry Valance (Lane). It also immediately lays out the power dynamic between the Outsiders, greasers from the wrong side of the tracks, and the Socials, a.k.a. Socs, the preppy, wealthy kids of their high school, as well as laying the foundations for the characters’ backstories. There’s a lot of story-setting subtext happening in this scene, from the cuts on Johnny’s face hinting at the abuse he suffers at home to the brief mention of Pony’s older brother, Darrel (Swayze), dropping out of school setting up his role as a father figure to them all.
3. Lolita (1962)
Lolita is one of the most well-known stories of our age, a brilliant, disturbing tale of middle-aged professor, Humbert Humbert, and his obsession that turns into a sexual relationship with his 12-year-old stepdaughter, Dolores, whom he nicknames “Lolita.” The scene at the drive-in, with Humbert (James Mason), his wife, Charlotte (Shelley Winters) and stepdaughter, Dolores (Sue Lyon), is a small moment but an important one as, even without a word, it visually establishes the boundaries Humbert begins to cross as he searches for small ways to fulfill his desire to touch Dolores. It also establishes that Humbert isn’t as inconspicuous as he thinks, and Charlotte picks up on his gestures toward her daughter and doesn’t approve.
4. Twister (1996)
Twister‘s drive-in movie scene was less about any character development, and more to show the horrifying and awesome power of a category F5 twister and what happens to people when they’re in an unprotected, outdoor setting – and no setting is more wide-open than a drive-in movie lot. At the time, the tornado in Twister was cutting edge CGI and it blew audiences away. It’s hard not to be awed by seeing Jack Torrance, one of film’s most iconic antagonists, being dwarfed by the terrifying spectacle of being ripped apart by a tornado. The visual lesson to be learned here? Nature always wins.
5. Pee-wee’s Big Adventure (1985)
Pee-wee’s Big Adventure, one of the many cult classics of the ’80s directed by Tim Burton, told the zany adventures of Pee-wee Herman as he traveled across the U.S. in order to get to the Alamo in Texas, where he thinks he’ll find his stolen bike (it’s a long story). He train-hops with vagabond hobos, sneaks past a police roadblock, hitches a ride with Large Marge, the ghost of a truck driver who died in a terrible accident, gets his wallet stolen by a phony psychic, rides a bull, gets amnesia, wanders into a biker bar, wrecks a motorcycle, sneaks into the Warner Bros. lot, and other absurd things. One of the studio execs hears of Pee-wee’s adventures and decides to turn them into a movie. Of course, this being Hollywood, his entire story is changed around and Pee-wee becomes a sword-toting ninja spy played by James Brolin. Pee-wee debuts his movie to his friends and family at – where else? – his local drive-in.
6. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)
Michel Gondry’s cerebral, sometimes-trippy, often-heartbreaking Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind has one of the more memorable scenes ever set at the drive-in. It’s the story of two lovers, Joel (Jim Carrey) and Clementine (Kate Winslet) who undergo an experimental procedure by the shadowy Lacuna Company to have their memories of one another erased after their love goes sour. But as his memories of her start to slip away, Joel realizes he still loves Clementine and wants to keep his memories of her. One of his happiest memories takes place at the drive-in, where they sit in a car just outside the drive-in fence and entertain themselves by making up dialogue to the movie. But as Lacuna techs hack in and start to erase the memory, Patrick desperately tries to hold on as the memory disintegrates in his mind.
7. Christine (1983)
Christine is a quintessential early Stephen King story: An evil, possessed car falls into the ownership of nerdy outcast, Arnie (Keith Gordon). And as he fixes up the car, which he names Christine, it slowly changes his personality from a thoughtful kid to a cocky, edgy greaser. Things start to go sideways when Arnie realizes Christine has a jealous, possessive mind of her own, and she soon starts killing off anyone she sees as a threat – and Leigh Cabot (Alexandra Paul), Arnie’s popular new girlfriend, is the biggest threat of all. From the start, Leigh is never comfortable in Christine, and it comes to a head in the drive-in scene. As Arnie steps outside to fix the windshield wipers, which have stopped working in the rain, Leigh starts choking on a hamburger she’s eating. Before Arnie can get back inside to help her, Christine locks her own doors as Leigh struggles to breathe. She manages to get the passenger door open and ultimately survives, but the damage is already done: Leigh tells Arnie there’s something unnatural and unsettling about his car and his paranoia that everyone is out to get him and Christine spirals out of control.
8. Once Upon a Time…In Hollywood (2019)
One of the movies on our list just so happens to be one of the movies that Sony is showing during its pop-up drive-in experience. While it’s true that no real scenes take place at the drive-in in Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood, Quentin Tarantino’s movie is a love letter to Hollywood and the magic of film and a dive into the nostalgia of it all – and that includes the romanticism of a drive-in theater. In fact, Tarantino loves the idea of the drive-in so much that character Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt) lives behind a drive-in, Cliff’s own love of movies so strong that he chooses to make a theater his home even when he’s not on set.
Get your tickets for the Sony Pictures Drive-In Experience here.
