The Former M-78 Drive-In & Super Cinemas, Lansing: 1969-1992
If you ever went to see movies at the M-78 Drive-In, you more than likely did what almost everybody else did.....I’m not referring to sneaking friends in by the trunk of your car, but something else: paying to see one movie and making an attempt to catch a movie on the other screens afterward.
We’d park on one screen lot and then walk to the other lots to watch a different movie. You couldn’t hear it very well unless you had a car speaker, but we did it nevertheless.
The M-78 opened on Friday, November 7th, 1969 and was open year-round, thanks to in-car heaters. There were two screens at first, the Blue and the Red. The debut movies were Romeo & Juliet and Prudence & The Pill on the Blue screen and The Madwoman Of Chaillot and The Green Berets on the Red Screen.
With the popularity of the M-78, a third screen was added in1977: the Green screen. Now we could pay for one movie and see three if we were clever enough.
There was going to be a fourth screen but it never happened. Super Cinemas happened instead. In 1992 the Green screen was torn down so Super Cinemas could be built and the Blue and Red screens of the M-78 stayed intact.
Super Cinemas had twelve screens to show a wide selection of second-run films at a much-reduced price: $2 a person. I went to the movies there a good number of times.....a two-buck admission price was sure a heckuva lot better than the 5-to-seven dollar range at the time found at the other theaters....that price seems reasonable now, compared to currently where a theater admission is almost as much as a week's pay.
After closing for a while in 1992, the M-78 drive-in was supposed to re-open for the 1993 season and co-exist with Super Cinemas but it never did.....the drive-in sat abandoned for years. Beaten by the popularity of the Super Cinemas, M-78 called it a day on September 7, 1992. The final films were Honeymoon In Vegas & A League Of Their Own on the Blue screen and Pet Sematary 2 & Poison Ivy on the Red screen.
The remainder of the M-78 was torn down in 1999 and in July 2000 even Super Cinemas called it quits. Located at 6385 Newton Road at M-78, the theater was demolished sometime between 2008-2011 and all that is left to show for it is a cracked, weedy parking lot.
M-78 Drive-In Theater Marquee Demo
M-78 Drive-in
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