Dearborn's Ford-Wyoming Drive-in destroyed box office expectations over the weekend

Because nothing makes any sense anymore and it feels like we're living somewhere between The Twilight Zone, a Black Mirror episode, and this Indian dude who erected a shrine to President Trump, which includes a flower-adorned effigy, this weekend a '90s movie about dino DNA topped the box office and a Detroit-area drive-in was the top-grossing theater in the country. Life, uh, found a way, dammit.

For the fourth time in history, Steven Spielberg’s 27-year-old Jurassic Park topped the box office, as those theaters that remain open struggle to push stale titles released before the pandemic as they await the first new batch of films since March, including Disney's live-action Mulan remake, a Russell Crowe flick, Unhinged, and Christopher Nolan's Tenet, all of which are expected to be released next month.

One metro Detroit theater, however, is doing more than hanging on, and managed to earn the top spot as the highest-grossing theater in the country over Father's Day weekend, Deadline reports.

The 70-year-old Ford-Wyoming Drive-in reopened earlier this month and raked in more than $127,000 this weekend. Of the 201 top-grossing theaters, 160 were drive-in cinemas. A Canadian drive-in followed with $105,000, and a theater in Sacramento came in third and brought in $71,000, whereas the top indoor multiplexes brought in less than $15,000.

Though the Ford-Wyoming was not among those theaters to screen Jurassic Park, they, too, are mixing in catalog titles with those more recent releases like Trolls World Tour and Michigan-made indie horror flick, The Wretched, a film that made history by topping the box office five-straight weeks when it was released in May. This weekend the Dearborn drive-in will resurrect 1981's Evil Dead and 2012's Marvel's The Avengers, the first in the ensemble-packed Avenger's franchise which grossed $1.519 billion worldwide when it was originally released.

Indoor movie theaters remain closed under Gov. Whitmer's executive order. Ford-Wyoming and other Michigan drive-in theaters were among those permitted to reopen earlier this month when Whitmer lifted the state-wide stay-at-home-order and ushered most of Michigan into phase 4 of her reopening plan.

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