Enjoy These 16 Drive-In Movie Classics at Home

Twister (1996)​

Another terrific drive-in flick that happens to have a drive-in in it: At one point in the film, a tornado blows up an Oklahoma theater in the middle of a screening of The Shining, sending Bill Paxton and Helen Hunt scurrying for cover. In 1996, in an incident that all but proves God is a movie fan, an actual tornado landed on a drive-in in Canada. The movie playing in that theater? That’s right: Twister. Luckily, there was far less damage than in director Jan de Bont’s version, and nobody was injured.​​

Watch it here: Amazon, Apple TV, Google Play

Caddyshack (1980)​

Harold Ramis reunited SNL alums Chevy Chase, now 78, and Bill Murray, now 71 — who in real life hated each other’s guts — in this sweetly raunchy golf-caddy comedy that also stars Ted Knight (who hated both Chase and Murray) and Rodney Dangerfield (who knew so little about filmmaking that Ramis had to explain what it meant when he yelled “Action!”). And even though the last-minute inclusion of a dancing gopher was one of many artistic decisions that frustrated writer-producer Douglas Kenney (who was on his own tragic decline with substance abuse and depression, and died during a postproduction trip to Hawaii), the resulting picture remains one of the most enduring cultural touchstones of the ’80s.​

​Watch it here: Apple TV, Amazon, Google Play

American Graffiti (1973)​

George Lucas’ tone poem to the early 1960s — with Richard Dreyfuss, Ron Howard and Charles Martin Smith playing high school graduates goofing off for the summer before starting college (or shipping off to Vietnam) — is so bursting with Kennedy-era exuberance that even millennials might get choked up. “A load of wonderful characters who whirl around in ducktail haircuts and shirtwaist dresses” is how The Hollywood Reporter described it in its rave review, predicting that it “may well prove to be a watershed film of major importance.” Much of the film was shot in the original Mel’s Drive-in restaurant in San Francisco, which is still in business today. (Indeed, there are now Mel’s up and down the California coastline.) Grill up some burgers for this showing at home.​​

Watch it here: Apple TV, Amazon, Google Play

48 Hrs. (1982)​

Eddie Murphy's first film role — in producer Joel Silver’s first movie — nearly went to Gregory Hines (who dropped out to do The Cotton Club). In fact, Richard Pryor, Howard E. Rollins Jr. and a young unknown named Denzel Washington (pre-St. Elsewhere) were all considered before 21-year-old Murphy finally landed the part of a convict who joins forces with Nick Nolte’s cop to hunt down a pair of killers. Film historians can debate whether it’s the first buddy cop movie (1974's Freebie and the Bean also has a claim), but either way it’s great drive-in fare.​​

Watch it here: Amazon, Google Play, Paramount+

Cars (2006)​

In the first cut of Pixar’s anthropomorphic CGI-animated road comedy, there was a sequence in which Lightning McQueen (voiced by Owen Wilson) takes Sally Carrera (Bonnie Hunt) to the Radiator Springs drive-in theater for a date. Talk about meta! Alas, that scene got cut, with just a piece of it ending up in Cars’ closing credits. Still, talking automobiles are a natural for drive-ins — and so far, nobody’s made a big-screen version of Knight Rider.​​

Watch it here: Disney+, Apple TV, Amazon

Sleeper (1973)​

Science fiction generally doesn’t fare well at drive-ins — the genre usually does better in dark, enclosed spaces — but Woody Allen’s futuristic farce is an exception. Allen plays a 20th-century health food store owner who gets cryogenically frozen for 200 years after a botched ulcer operation and defrosted “like a TV dinner” in 2173. As preposterous as the plot sounds, it’s actually grounded in some science: Allen met with real-life scientist and sci-fi writer Isaac Asimov for lunch while writing the script to make sure his predictions for the future (which included an orb-like object called the Orgasmatron) weren’t too fanciful.​​

Watch it here: Amazon, Spectrum

Psycho (1960)​

Alfred Hitchcock’s seminal slasher thriller was actually an experiment to explore cheaper, TV-style filmmaking techniques (he hired mostly television pros for the crew). But this scaled-down, black-and-white production — starring Anthony Perkins as the ultimate mama’s boy, Norman Bates, and Janet Leigh as his not-so-squeaky-clean victim — went on to become one of Hitch’s biggest hits. Film history bonus: It also happens to be the first Hollywood movie ever to show a toilet.​​

Watch it here: Apple TV, Amazon, Google Play​

RELATED: Not only is Psycho a masterpiece for the drive-in, it’s also one of our critics’ picks for the all-time best movies of the decade. See which other films made our list, right here: Stream the Best Movies of the 1960s

​Rush Hour (1998)​

Not everyone fell in love with this East-meets-West buddy comedy starring Chris Tucker as an LAPD cop who’s investigating a kidnapping and forced to babysit a visiting Chinese detective played by Jackie Chan. “I still don’t like the movie,” Chan told the Los Angeles Times in 2002. “I don’t like the way I speak English, and I don’t know what Chris Tucker is saying.” Still, the film, directed by Brett Ratner, was a box office smash, grossing $244 million worldwide (off a budget of just $33 million), and it spawned two sequels, with Chan appearing in both.​​

Watch it here: Apple TV, Amazon, Google Play

Back to the Future (1985)​

Somewhere in a Hollywood vault, there’s footage of Eric Stoltz playing Marty McFly. Thankfully, director Robert Zemeckis and producer Bob Gale took a mulligan five weeks into the production and recast Michael J. Fox as the ’80s teenager who accidentally drives a time-traveling DeLorean back into the 1950s. One of the decade’s biggest hits, its fans included President Ronald Reagan, who quoted one of Christopher Lloyd’s lines in his 1986 State of the Union address: “Where we’re going, we don’t need roads.” What Reagan’s speechwriters neglected to note is that in the film, Doc Brown himself expresses pure incredulity that an actor could become president: “Then who’s vice president? Jerry Lewis?” A classic for any screen — and era.​​

Watch it here: Amazon, Apple TV

Jurassic Park (1993)​

Twenty-seven years after its original release, Steven Spielberg’s dinosaur epic was once again number 1 at the box office during COVID, thanks in part to new-release-starved drive-in theaters. The picture earned a (sort of) whopping $517,000 during just one weekend in June 2020 (adding to its lifetime gross of $1.03 billion). Obviously, those sneezing brontosauruses and scheming velociraptors are best experienced on a big screen — as are stars Jeff Goldblum, Laura Dern, Sam Neill and, in a small role, Samuel L. Jackson — but a 50-inch 4K flat-screen will do in a pinch.​​

Watch it here: HBO Max, Apple TV, iTunes, Google Play ​

Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986)​

Fans have been waiting decades for a sequel to John Hughes’ 1980s idyll about a superconfident high school senior who’s got the world (or at least Chicago) on a string. At one point there was talk of a Ferris Bueller-in-college movie, then a Ferris-as-a-grownup film, but star Matthew Broderick, now 60, nixed all suggestions, arguing that the original didn’t need updating. He was right, of course. All these decades later, Ferris holds up spectacularly well: “The most life-affirming movie possibly of the entire postwar period” is how cast member Ben Stein described it (he all but stole the movie playing the boring economics teacher). “This is to comedies what Gone With the Wind is to epics.”​​

Watch it here: Amazon, Google Play, Paramount+, Apple TV ​​

The Evil Dead (1981)​

Writer-director Sam Raimi’s campy, low-budget horror film — it cost a mere $350,000 — spawned a cult media empire, with four sequels, a TV series and a slew of video games (not to mention four decades’ worth of cabin-in-the-woods knockoffs). The original film isn’t for everyone — series star Bruce Campbell, the so-called “Laurence Olivier of bad movies,” spills enough plasma battling the menacing supernatural entity that’s lurking in the fog to fill an Olympic-size pool. (Characters are stabbed, bludgeoned, assaulted by evil trees, hacked to bits and burned.) Still, by today’s standards, the fake blood looks more comical than disturbing,and hats off to Raimi for trying so hard to make the goriest drive-in movie ever.​

Watch it here: Amazon, iTunes, Google Play, YouTube ​

Ben Svetkey is a contributing writer who covers film and entertainment. Editorial director of Los Angeles Magazine, he previously was a top editor at The Hollywood Reporter and Entertainment Weekly and is the author of the Hollywood novel Leading Man.

Editor's note: This article was originally published on Aug. 3, 2020. It has been updated with movie trailers and current streaming links for each of these films.