3 Drive-In Theaters Arkansans Grew Up Going To
The 112 Drive-In opened off Highway 112 in Fayetteville in 1980, after the 71 Drive-In closed.
If you’re an Arkansan, you may have watched a movie or two from the hood of your car there.
Here are the drive-in theaters Arkansans grew up going to.
1. Kenda Drive-In
Kenda Drive-In in Marshall opened in 1966.
The Encyclopedia of Arkansas credits Kenneth and Marilyn Sanders with opening it.
The couple already ran the Ken Theatre, an indoor movie house in downtown Marshall.
Their children helped too, mowing, picking up trash, running the projection booth and working the concessions.
The norm was seven nights a week, with as many as four movies in rotation each week.
Locals made up the majority of the early crowds.
Later, audiences came from all over Arkansas and southern Missouri.
By the 1980s, the entry says, cable TV and VHS recordings were cutting into drive-ins across the country, but the Kenda survived the lean years.
Arkansas Business reported in 2023 that the couple passed the business to their daughter in 2003.
The daughter, a retired high school teacher, kept the concession stand busy while her husband worked the box office.
The Kenda removed its playground equipment, once standard at drive-ins, over liability insurance premiums.
SAH Archipedia, an architecture database, describes rows of parking for around 200 cars in a shallow arc facing a screen 72 feet wide.
A signboard at the corner of Westwood Drive and U.S. 65 tells you the current film.
As of October 2026, the Kenda’s website lists Friday, Saturday and Sunday nights for its fall and winter schedule.
2. Stone Drive-In
Stone Drive-In in Mountain View dates back to the mid-1960s, according to a 2020 report from Jonesboro station KAIT.
The same family had owned and run it for three generations.
The three co-owners were siblings who had spent most of their lives at the theater, including countless weekends.
One of them remembered sleeping on a cot during the movie, then getting up for school the next morning.
At the time, you could still get an old speaker, even as the owners upgraded to wireless radio sound.
That summer, with new movies on hold because of the pandemic, the Stone screened a Garth Brooks concert.
The family was looking ahead to a Blake Shelton and Gwen Stefani concert next.
The 2023 Arkansas Business story said the Stone and the Kenda were established within a year of each other and were the state’s only drive-ins of their kind.
In May 2025, radio station KKYR counted two Arkansas drive-ins still open, the Stone and the Kenda.
The Stone’s schedule was Thursday through Sunday, rain or shine.
For more information, see the Stone’s Facebook page.
Psst! How much do you know about drive-in theaters? Take our quiz and see if you can ace it.
Quiz
Drive-In Trivia
Answer these questions on drive-in theaters, from the first one in Camden to a few Arkansas screens. We bet you can’t get them all right. Prove us wrong?
What movie played on opening night at the first drive-in theater, in Camden, New Jersey?
3. 112 Drive-In
The 112 Drive-In opened in 1980 off Highway 112 in Fayetteville, after the 71 Drive-In closed, according to a 5NEWS report.
Opening night was June 26, 1980, when dozens of cars followed one family from the old 71 Drive-In to the new 112, about 3½ miles west.
The area manager when it opened, a longtime theater man in Lawton, Oklahoma, and Northwest Arkansas, helped pick the land.
A Springdale couple said they remembered coming to the drive-in when they were young.
A former employee who worked there in the early 2000s traveled from Kansas before the closing to show his kids what a drive-in was.
The owners sold the property in spring 2022, after rezoning the land.
The 112 was set to close at the end of August 2022, after 42 years.
The headline called it the last drive-in movie theater in Northwest Arkansas.
Nationwide, only 318 drive-in theaters were left in 2022, according to the United States Drive-In Theatre Owners Association.
For its final two weekends, the 112 went retro, with Grease and Footloose scheduled for the last Friday and Saturday.
Summer 2020 at the Kenda
In June 2020, the Kenda Drive-In was playing older films and drawing smaller crowds, which its owner blamed on a lack of new releases.
The theater had scheduled a July double feature of The Legend of Boggy Creek and Bootleggers, both filmed in Arkansas and directed by Arkansas native Charles B. Pierce.
For a time, the theater also stopped handing out portable speakers with tickets, and you could hear the movie through large speakers outside or an FM radio channel.
James Junction's 2020 Opening
James Junction, a drive-in near Pocahontas, opened on July 10, 2020, decades after the others on this list.
Its founders opened it on what used to be a hay field in Randolph County, a few miles south of Pocahontas.
One founder noticed that many people from his hometown area were driving to the Stone Drive-In in Mountain View.
Parking cost $20 in the front rows and $15 in the back rows, and showtimes began at dusk.
Customers came from throughout Northeast Arkansas, and the founders' company had a mobile projection unit for outdoor screenings for churches and cities.
The founders aimed for 40 to 50 cars a show and were averaging 80 or more.
Neither the 2023 Arkansas Business story nor the 2025 KKYR roundup listed James Junction.
The Talk Business story counted fewer than 500 drive-ins left in the United States in 2020.
That was down from more than 5,000 at the peak, which ran from the mid-1950s through the end of the 1960s.
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