The Best Drive-In Near L.A. Costs $10, and It Isn’t in L.A. County

Three drive-ins still sell tickets within 60 miles of downtown, and the order runs on what each ticket actually buys.

A ticket at the Paramount Drive-In costs $14 tonight, and it buys one movie. The theatre’s own price panel says so in eight words, printed under a lineup of four films across two screens: “Tickets are for a single show time only.” An hour east, in Riverside County, two drive-ins charge $10 and sell you a screen instead of a seat. Whatever runs on it after dark, you’re parked for it.

That’s the whole test here. Not the snack bar, not the nostalgia, not whose tower photographs best — what the ticket buys once the car is stopped, and how far you drove to buy it. We read all four operators’ own pages on September 30, compared the posted prices against the schedules each theatre published for this week, and measured the drive from City Hall on OpenStreetMap routing data with no traffic in it. Nobody from this desk sat through a double feature.

Three are left worth ranking, and that number is a story before any of them is. The four-screen drive-in in City of Industry has stopped posting showtimes. The one in Montclair is being replaced by half a million square feet of warehouse.

1. Van Buren Drive-In, Riverside — $10, three screens, and it opens every night of the week

First, and the case is mostly arithmetic. Ten dollars gets an adult through the gate on Van Buren Boulevard, a child between five and nine gets in for a dollar, and the ticket, in the theatre’s own words on its visitor page, “allows entry to one screen where you may watch both movies showing.” Two films for ten dollars is five dollars a movie, which is less than a matinee anywhere with a roof over it.

It’s also the only one of the three open seven nights a week, and the only one honest on the page about how little it knows: showtimes go up on Wednesdays, five days at a time, and the site says plainly that the theatre doesn’t have the schedule further out than that. Gates open an hour before showtime on Friday and Saturday and 30 minutes before every other night. Outside food and non-alcoholic drinks are fine. Sound is FM only, there’s no wifi, and the theatre’s own answer to the can-I-stream-it-on-my-phone question is that a small portable FM radio works better.

What you can’t do is shop the lot. Any lane gets you into any screen, but once you’ve picked one, switching is out — including turning the car around to watch something on another. The theatre opened in 1964 with a single screen on a former orange ranch and went to three in 1975; it added FM transmitters and Technalight projection in 2006 and digital cinema in 2015. Measured on the map it’s 55 miles and about 69 minutes from City Hall without traffic, and that hour is the real price of the $10.

2. Rubidoux Drive-In, Jurupa Valley — a 1948 tower, and two different prices on the same website

Older, prettier, five miles closer, and second, because the site can’t agree with itself about what a ticket costs. The admissions panel on the theatre’s page reads “ADULTS: $10, KIDS (5-9): $1.” The FAQ on the same site answers the question “How much is it to get in?” with “$9 for adults.” Both were live on September 30. Ten is the number printed beside the showtimes, so ten is what we ranked it on. Bring the extra dollar and enjoy the surprise if it’s nine.

Everything else about the place is the argument for driving out anyway. Roy C. Hunt, a Riverside movie man, opened the Rubidoux in November 1948 with one screen and room for about 690 cars, and the art deco tower he built is still standing — remodeled once, in the mid-1950s, when CinemaScope made the old frame too narrow. Two more screens went up in 1983, and the snack bar and box office were redone after 2000 in a postwar Route 66 style. The operator’s history page calls it “the last of the classic drive-in theatres remaining in Southern California,” which is a claim about vintage rather than survival, and on vintage it’s right: this is the only one of the three where the thing you’re parked in front of is older than the freeway you took to get there.

Check the calendar before you go. The theatre has four three-night Taylor Swift runs booked — October 13 through 15, 20 through 22, 27 through 29, and November 3 through 5 — at $19.89 for adults and $13.13 for children 2 to 12 and seniors 60 and over, sold at the gate with no advance tickets. That’s twelve nights this autumn at roughly double the regular price, and it’s the one stretch where the five-dollars-a-movie math stops working.

3. Paramount Drive-In — 21 minutes from downtown, and $14 for one movie

Here’s the placement worth arguing about, and we’ll take the argument. Paramount is the closest of the three to Los Angeles by a wide margin — 14.6 miles and about 21 minutes from City Hall, measured the same way — and it’s the best-equipped of the three, with two 75-foot screens, Barco digital laser projection and FM sound. On every attribute but one, it wins this ranking outright.

The one is the ticket. General admission is $14 for anyone 12 and older, $7 for children 3 to 11 and free for toddlers, and directly beneath the showtimes the theatre’s own now-playing page carries the line that settles the order: “Tickets are for a single show time only.” Tonight that meant Resident Evil and Forgotten Island at 7:30 and Insidious: Out of the Further and Spider-Man: Brand New Day at 10:30 — four movies, two screens, one of them per ticket. Stay for the late show and you’re buying a second ticket.

So the comparison isn’t $14 against $10. It’s $14 a movie against $5 a movie, over another 36 miles of freeway. Two adults and two children between five and nine pay $42 at Paramount for one film and $22 in Riverside for a screen, and no tank of gas closes a twenty-dollar gap. Buy on the night, too: there are no online tickets, they’re sold at the entrance first come, and the box office opens an hour before the movie starts.

The second movie is not a promise

One caveat runs under both Riverside entries, and neither theatre hides it: the second film is a second film only when the studios allow it. Van Buren’s page says some titles have to be single-billed under studio contracts, and this week’s schedules show what that looks like in practice. At both drive-ins, one screen paired Primetime at 7:30 with Insidious: Out of the Further later in the evening — two different movies, the thing the pitch describes. The other two screens ran Heart of the Beast twice and Resident Evil twice. On two screens out of three, $10 bought one movie you were welcome to watch again. Cheaper than $14. Not a double feature.

Not ranked, and why

Vineland, in City of Industry, is the one this ranking wanted: a drive-in lot 16 miles from City Hall, closer than anything but Paramount. The swap meet sharing it documents itself like a going concern — opened in 1984 “at the Vineland Drive In location,” 600-plus vendor spaces, 30,000 shoppers a week, free parking, open seven days a week year-round, with shopper hours of 7 a.m. to 3 p.m. What that site never publishes, on its about page or its Q&A or its news page, is a showtime, a film title or an admission price for the theatre, and we couldn’t find one anywhere else on September 30 either. Everything it prices is the swap meet.

Mission Tiki, in Montclair, is why this list is three long instead of four. The San Bernardino County Sentinel reported in February 2023 that the drive-in went dark that January, after its operator, De Anza Land and Leisure, sold the property to Oakmont Industrial Group for $34.4 million, and that the city cleared the site for a business park of roughly 513,000 square feet of industrial space. Sixty-seven years of screens, then a warehouse.

South Bay, down near San Diego, is out on distance rather than merit. It’s $10 and $1 on exactly the Riverside terms, three screens since a 1974 remodel, running since 1958 — and it’s also the cleanest example of why we ranked posted pages instead of reputations. Its history page says it’s “open 7 days a week, 362 days a year.” Its home page on September 30 said, six times over, “THEATRES CLOSED MONDAY - THURSDAY.”

Skyline in Barstow and Smith’s Ranch in Twentynine Palms are both a long way past anything a Los Angeles reader would call near, and neither has an operator’s page we could find posting a current admission price. A price we can’t read is a price we don’t rank.

If you’re going once this month, go to Van Buren on a Friday. The gate opens at 6:30 for the 7:30, $10 puts an adult on a screen, and the week’s schedule goes up the Wednesday before.