Drive south out of Driggs on Highway 33 today and Old Murphy is still parked where he's always been, the 1946 Chevrolet flatbed hauling its giant plaster potato past a lot that has sat mostly empty since the spring of 2022. The ticket booth is there. The snack bar is there. What isn't there is the screen, and it hasn't been there for four and a half years now.
Most of us in Teton Valley have stopped asking when the Spud is reopening and started asking why it keeps not happening. The honest answer isn't about money, and it isn't about whether anyone still wants a drive-in theater on Highway 33. Both of those questions were settled within days of the screen coming down. What's actually kept the Spud dark since 2022 is a zoning problem, and understanding that problem is the only way to make sense of why the reopening date keeps sliding, most recently to mid-summer 2027.
The Night the Screen Came Down
The wind that hit Teton Valley on the evening of April 4, 2022 topped 55 mph in gusts, and it caught the Spud's original screen tower, a wood-and-metal structure that had stood since the theater opened in 1953. Manager Jedd Mumm stepped outside to check on a chimney and realized he could see stars where the 60-foot screen should have been blocking the sky. By morning, his wife Katie Mumm was standing in the wreckage telling reporters the drive-in would rebuild, and Teton Valley's Facebook groups were already organizing donations and offers of equipment before the sun was fully up.
That part of the story, community will and insurance money, was never in question. The Spud had been on the National Register of Historic Places since 2003, and it was one of the last drive-ins in the country with an intact original wooden screen. Losing it stung the way losing a shared landmark stings, and the valley responded the way small communities do.
The Problem No One Could Fix With a Checkbook
What actually stalled the rebuild for years wasn't a shortage of will or funding. It was that the Spud sits on what planners call a non-conforming, grandfathered parcel, meaning the property predates Teton County's current land-use code and doesn't cleanly fit any category the code recognizes. Drive-in theaters, as a defined use, simply didn't exist in the county's zoning rules. That left the property's owners in what redevelopment manager Tom Hedges has called a legal gray area, unable to secure the permits needed to invest in reconstruction even as the rebuild budget grew and public support never wavered.
MD Landscaping and Nursery, a local landscaping company, bought the Spud in August 2023 with plans to restore it. In February 2024, the Driggs City Council approved a sewer connection for the property, clearing one utility hurdle. A 2025 reopening looked realistic at that point. But the zoning question sat unresolved, and by September 2025 the county had opened a formal process to amend its land-use code specifically to give drive-in theaters a legal path to exist.
That process moved slowly by design. A pre-application conference in November 2025 led to a Planning and Zoning Commission hearing in February 2026, which sent recommended modifications to the county commissioners. On April 29, 2026, the Teton County Board of Commissioners voted unanimously to add drive-in theaters as a recognized land use, the first time in the county's history that category has existed on paper. Commissioner Ron James called it good for the community. Nikki Richards of Valley Advocates for Responsible Development told commissioners the decision reached beyond one property.
Passing that ordinance didn't put a screen back up. It just opened the next gate.
"It's just it's like molasses," Hedges said of the pace of the county's review.
What Got Approved on September 14
Five days before we sat down to write this, on September 14, the county commissioners worked through the special use permit that MD Spud LLC needed for the actual rebuild, an 8.59-acre proposal that includes a 55.5-foot screen tower, a roughly 3,300-square-foot restaurant and concession building, the 10 campsites already approved for conversion into short-term Airstream rentals, and additional parking. The permit came with conditions that read like a checklist built from four years of public comment: hours limited to 8 a.m. to 2 a.m., all lighting off when the drive-in isn't operating, sound systems designed to minimize noise beyond the property line, and the screen oriented away from the highway so headlights and passing traffic aren't a distraction.
Driggs also extended the property's wastewater "will serve" letter, first approved in 2024, giving MD Spud LLC until February 6, 2028 to complete the sewer connection. That's a practical deadline more than a sign of urgency, but it tells you the city expects this to take real time.
According to the most recent reporting from Teton Valley News, the special use permit was the last formal leg of the path toward reopening. County planning staff have said the timeline from here depends on how quickly remaining approvals move. If they're expedited, Hedges expects the Spud could be showing movies by mid-summer 2027.
Why 2027, Not This Year
If you've been half-listening to Spud updates since 2022, the moving target probably feels familiar. There was hope for a 2023 reopening before supply chain issues and permitting delays pushed it out. Then 2025 became the working date once the sewer approval came through. At various points last year, midsummer 2026 was floated as realistic once the land-use amendment looked close. Each of those dates assumed the zoning fight would resolve faster than it did.
What's different now is that the zoning fight is actually over. The ordinance passed in April. The special use permit process is nearly finished. For the first time since the screen came down, the Spud has a legal category to exist in, and the remaining work is construction and final sign-off rather than a fight over whether the project is even allowed. That's worth something, even if it means one more full summer season, and likely part of another, without movies under the stars.
For a lot of us, the Spud was never really about the movie playing on the screen. It was the ritual of showing up in pajamas with a truck bed full of blankets, buying popcorn from the same snack bar generations of Teton Valley kids grew up visiting, and parking in a field where you could watch the Tetons go dark before the film started. Places like that don't get replaced easily, and the valley's patience with a four-year rebuild says something about how much people here value keeping them.
We'll be watching the next round of county filings the way a lot of our neighbors will, hoping the mid-summer 2027 target holds. In the meantime, Old Murphy and his potato are still worth the drive south of town for a photo, even with an empty lot behind him.
We spend a lot of time paying attention to the small civic decisions that shape daily life in Teton Valley, because those decisions tend to say more about a place than any listing ever could. If you're weighing a move here, or you already call this valley home and want a team that reads zoning agendas as closely as market reports, Wealthwise Real Estate is glad to talk it through with you.
