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It turns out drive-in cinemas are like buses. You spend months waiting for one to appear and then three come along at once. First there was the announcement that @TheDriveIn would be pulling into 12 UK cities this summer for an all-Americana drive-in movie theatre experience, with roller waiters and all. Then The Luna Cinema announced plans for an outdoor cinema you can enjoy from the socially-distanced confines of your car, complete with a bespoke speaker system so you don’t have to rely on your car radio.
The latest is The Drive In, which is scheduled to launch on July 4 at Troubadour Meridian Water in Enfield. If that doesn’t ring a bell, it’s because the Troubadour is a new site (from the team behind the Troubadour Wembley Park theatre). As with @TheDriveIn and The Luna Cinema, the Enfield theatre intends to open with social-distancing measures in place. Cars will be two metres apart, food can be ordered using a mobile app and the aim is for everything to be no-contact, which means tickets will be scanned through a closed car window.
The films on offer are the usual suspects of outdoor screening events: ‘La La Land’, ‘Bad Boys for Life’, ‘Dirty Dancing’ and ‘The Terminator’, but there are plans to show pre-recorded theatre performances too (if people aren’t streamed out from watching National Theatre online premieres every Thursday). The price is set at £35 per car and there will be free tickets for NHS workers.
It looks like London’s vehicle owners will be spending this summer the same way most of us spent our summers as teenagers: hanging out in car parks waiting for something exciting to happen.
Find out more here.
Not interested in watching ‘La La Land’ from a Zipcar? Watch dozens of movies from the Golden Age of Hollywood for free on iPlayer.
When will London’s cinemas reopen? We tried to find out.