2nd drive-in theater in city opens

With the capacity to welcome up to 150 vehicles in one sitting, Shanghai's second drive-in movie theater opens today with Hollywood box office hit The Avengers and Hong Kong director Ho Yim's Hundreds Years of a Floating City.　

The new cinema Griffing covers an area of 10,000 square meters, or a space equivalent to that of four standard football fields, slightly larger than the city's first and only other drive-in, which opened last year in August in Baoshan district and accommodates a maximum of 120 vehicles, which reportedly sees a weekly average of about 130 vehicles.

"We're very confident about the prospects of drive-in cinema in Shanghai," Zhu Xiaodong, Griffing's director, told the Global Times yesterday. "The drive-in has some advantages over traditional theaters; it solves parking problems and allows audiences to privacy - and even family pets can join the affair."

Two massive screens, about 200 square meters in size, will be used to show the same film at once, or two different films at the same time; with the latter giving viewers another movie option depending on the direction they face in their vehicles, said Zhu.

The theater will open from 7 pm to 4 am daily. Each car will be charged 150 yuan ($23), while vehicles with more than nine seats will be prohibited from entering.