BIG BOX DRIVE-IN MOVIE

THE WALMART DRIVE-IN
Various Locations
2020

Walmart in partnership with the Tribeca Film Festival

Piggybacking Tactic
Share a Resource to Multiply Use

Typically, use-multiplying piggybackings involve two parties and entail the negotiation of shared resources. But sometimes individual actors come up with creative ways to multiply the functional programming of their own spatial resources, as is demonstrated in the case of the BIG BOX DRIVE-IN. In the summer of 2020, in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, Walmart partnered with the Tribeca Film Festival to offer drive-in movies in the parking lots of 160 Walmart stores across the United States. Responding to both the temporary closure of traditional movie theaters and the widespread desire for family outings that complied with safe social-distancing protocols, the program converted the otherwise monofunctional asphalt expanses of Walmart Supercenters into spaces of collective assembly and entertainment. In this way, the company leveraged both its spatial ubiquity and its expertise in logistics to quickly deploy the program at scale to serve a previously unanticipated public desire. While the Walmart Drive-In program can be understood on one level as a corporate public relations opportunity, it also revealed the untapped potential of the company’s 3,534 Supercenters as latent infrastructures of public assembly. What other forms of public life might their vast parking lots be redesigned for?