The Clearwater Drive-In in Kyle, SK has not been open since March 23, after the provincial government announced non-essential businesses would be closed until further notice.

The province of Saskatchewan has one of the most restrictive pandemic guidelines. More restrictive than Albert, more restrictive than British Columbia. In those western provinces, drive-in theatres can operate, following social distancing parameters and sanitization measures.

This leaves owners of the Kyle, SK Clearwater Drive-In Theatre with expectations from the public that their drive-in should be open as well.

Owner and Operator, Denise Kelk explains,

“People automatically assume that I should be able to operate the same way. Under Saskatchewan restrictions as they have been laid out to me from the business support line, I cannot open.  I understand where the government is coming from because you cannot assume that everybody is going to stay in their vehicles and so on. I am told that I must remain closed in every way until the government lifts the restrictions.”

In addition to the stress already mounting from so much uncertainty, there is another challenge the drive-in faces, should it be able to re-open.

Kelk adds,

“Right at this point and time, if the government, depending on when they lift the restrictions, and how much they lift the restrictions, there's another problem that is effecting the theatre industry and that is that there is virtually no product there except for product that was released at the beginning of the year.  All of the studios pretty much kicked their products down the road to either late summer, fall of next year or gone to streaming, video on demand, Disney Plus things like that.”

Some suggestions have been made that the drive-in could play older movies instead, perhaps like a retro movie night. Unfortunately, things are not that simple.

Kelk expands,

“For older movies from the '80s or '90s, you have to have the right movie for people to come out. We have issues with our projector in that it is limited to playing movies in the hard drive. There is no more film (35mm films are no longer out there). Our equipment does have the capability of hooking a DVD player and playing through our projector.  We have some technical issues with that which we have not been able to figure out.  We even had our projector technician look at it and he can't figure it out and that's not good enough.  We would be limited to a hard drive movie and not all old movies are in a hard drive, which is what the studios produce for us to use.  We are limited to that so we can't just pick a movie from the '70s and have a retro night, that movie isn't on a hard drive.”

If that is not challenging enough, should the province decide that drive-ins can resume business in a few months, Kelk is not sure how much of the movie season she can salvage. She shares,

“I am hoping that we can salvage some of our season but it all depends what the province lets me do and again, for example, if it's late July, I'm not going to be able to just start-up business in 3 days.  It will take at least 2 -3 weeks.  By the time I figure out what I can show, make those arrangements with the studio, and if my concession can be open, then I have to order the product in, which is trucked in only maybe bi-weekly, or monthly, so that's a problem. That takes me into the middle of August by the time I have those arrangements in place. Typically, my season is done over in September Labor Day weekend. Then I must consider how much time is left in the season to salvage.  If it is only 2 weeks, I do not know if that would even be attractive or feasible for us. There are so many unknowns right now.” 

Clearwater Drive-In wants people to know that they would like to be open, but it is out of their hands. Perhaps after the province releases the new economic strategy on the 22, things might work out; however, there are no guarantees.