The Galaxy Drive-In, on Interstate 45 north of Ennis at exit 255, is a drive-in movie theatre built from nothing in the 2000s, decades after most drive-ins had closed. It opened on December 17, 2004, with three screens, on what had been a field of mesquite trees with cows roaming it. Screens were added over the next two decades, a fourth in 2007, a fifth in 2011 and a sixth in 2012, with a seventh reported by 2016 and an eighth and ninth in 2022 and 2023. The lot holds about 800 cars. Each screen has its own FM radio frequency for the sound. Marsha Murray and her husband, Martin, had run a drive-in in North Carolina in the 1990s.
Marsha Murray told The Shorthorn, the University of Texas at Arlington student paper, in 2010 that they had wanted a drive-in to take their own family to and found that the ones near them had mostly shut down in the 1980s, and that a Universal Studios branch manager encouraged them to build one in North Texas. For about a year they ran the North Carolina theatre on weekends and drove seventeen hours to Texas to look for a site. They moved to Texas in 2001 with no experience of running a theatre business, and fitted out the Galaxy partly with equipment stripped from theatres that had closed. "We wanted to make the drive-in look like it belongs in the 1950s," she said. In 2010 the grounds also had two miniature golf courses and small red speaker boxes that clipped onto a car window.
Getting there
32.3797, -96.6506
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