Did you know that In 1995 Disney had plans to build and open a drive-in movie theater
at the parking lot of the Disney-MGM Studios?
Here’s the thing: This is one of those projects that didn’t get very far before it was axed.
In fact, for as much as I tried to dig deeper into this story, all I was able to find at
the end of the day were two newspaper mentions.
And honestly, if one of them didn’t include a direct quote from a Disney executive, I
might have just written the whole thing off as a rumor.
But sure enough, in a tourism roundup article in the Orlando Sentinel in May of 1995, reporter
Leslie Doolittle covered Disney’s plans for the drive-in.
What little details we got came from Bob Lamb, the VP in charge of Disney-MGM Studios at
the time.
Lamb, talking about the drive-in, was quoted saying “We would be looking for the nostalgia
angle, with the snack bar and all.
Fortunately, the architecture of the park is in that period”, which was true.
The park’s focus spans a few eras, including the 1950s which is when the drive-in saw its
rise in popularity.
The plans included using part of the parking lot to show both newer Disney films as well
as Disney classics, and Lamb went on to suggest that whenever possible, Disney characters
relevant to the films being shown would be setup as meet and greets before and after
the movie.
Now even at the time of the announcement, if you can even call it an announcement, Disney
recognized that the odds of these plans being carried out were lower than usual.
It’s an idea though that, at first glance, kind of made sense for them.
This was an era of Disney that wanted to grab any market that might have been a part of
a Florida vacation.
Whether it was their own hotels, golf courses, water parks, backlot tours, shopping centers,
nightclubs, cruises, or timeshares.
If people were likely to partake in it during a vacation, Disney wanted to be the one selling
it to you.
And while going to the movies on vacation isn’t really high up on that list, it was
still a possibility, more so when you consider that Disney was known for their films.
I was able to find was another callout in the Sentinel over a year later, in June of 1996.
It had no Disney quotes or new details, but it suggested that the closing of Orlando’s
last three drive-ins that year hadn’t impacted Disney’s own plans.
Funny enough, that’s the last mention of the project that I could find.
So, ya know, maybe it did impact their plans.
Now, there are countless reasons why the project might have been canceled.
The most obvious being that while the park banked on nostalgia, the business model of
the drive-in was still a failing one.
By the end of the 1950s, there were reportedly just over four thousand drive-in theaters
across the United States.
By 1995 that number had plummeted to just under six-hundred.
So unlike the other business ventures that Disney was trying to get a slice of at the
time, this wasn’t one that looked like it was going to grow anytime soon.
It also could have been seen as a conflict of interest.
At the end of 1988, a ten-theater AMC called the “Pleasure Island 10” opened at the
Disney Village.
Disney didn’t, and still doesn’t, own AMC, (at least not yet) so it’s not that
they’d be competing with themselves directly.
However they did own the land that AMC was leasing, and it stood as a value-add to the
Disney Village experience.
So at the end of the day, they had reasons to want the AMC to do well, and so the drive-in
might still have been seen as working against their own interests.
It also raised some logistical issues.
Would you run the movies after the park closed so that you could clear out the parking lot first?
Or were you just reserving spots all day and eating up valuable parking space?
Maybe in the era of MGM being a half-day park that wouldn’t be a problem, but with the
Tower of Terror opening just a year earlier, that era was coming to a close.
Lastly, there was somewhat of a redundancy.
If part of their goal was to bank on the nostalgia of Drive-In Theaters, well, they were already
doing that with the Sci-Fi Dine-In Restaurant, which was inside the theme park.
That opened in 1991, so it was already around for about four years before this idea showed up.
It’s not a 1:1 comparison to an actual Drive-In since it was a restaurant and didn’t play
full movies, but it might have been close enough to be seen as self-sabotage.
Guests may have wanted that nostalgic feeling enough to do one or the other, but possibly not both.
Whatever the reason, the concept just kind of fell off the face of the Earth.
Normally I don’t think I’d cover something so inconsequential.
It was a Disney project that never got formally announced, never offered any concept art,
no details, no timetables.
But that’s also kind of why I wanted to talk about it.
This unrealized drive-in movie theater represented a little slice of a different era of The Walt
Disney Company.
It was from a time where a VP of the parks had no problem talking to the press about ideas they were
working on that weren’t a sure thing.
It was a part of that same era where they wanted to throw a last-second Birthday celebration
for Mickey Mouse and threw together a whole land practically overnight.
It’s from the time when Michael Eisner’s wife, Jane, had an idea for an ad campaign
about going to Disney after winning the Superbowl and just a few weeks later it was made.
There was this loose experimentation and sense of freedom when it came to what the company
could do.
It also just serves as another little reminder that for every Disney Parks project we end
up getting, there are countless more that could have been.
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