You have a few more weeks to catch a movie at Coyote Drive-In.
Over the summer, my family hopped in the car one night and headed to the Coyote Drive-In in Fort Worth. Incredibly, I was the only one in the car who had ever been to a drive-in theater. As a child, my family would pack up the station wagon with snacks and blankets for a double feature—an early show for the kids, a PG movie later when the children all fell asleep, already dressed in pajamas. I explained the joys of watching a movie under the stars as we made our way downtown, and then made the turns to the field that looked like nothing during the day but turned into a communal space to watch cartoons, Jedi battles, love stories, or time travel once dusk arrived.
As it turns out, my family’s first trip to a drive-in theater to watch Back to the Future would also be our last trip: This week, the owners of the 14-year-old Coyote Drive-In announced that the place would close after Labor Day. Why? Because the drive-in’s original lease terms says the lease ends one the Trinity River Water District begins its construction of two new canals and a three-acre park exactly where the drive-in sits. That construction will commence in the near future.
The number of drive-in movie theaters in the country is dwindling for a variety of reasons: They often sit on giant plots of land that have become more valuable for development, for one. The move to digital projection is also a factor. There are roughly 300 in operation in the U.S., the New York Film Academy says. Ohio, New York, and Pennsylvania each have almost 30, making them the states with the most. Our guide to drive-in movies expanded a couple of years ago to include outdoor movies in general, but there are still five—or rather, four and one closing next month—on the list.