By Sahar Foladi
The longest and largest running Lunar drive-in, at 115 South Gippsland Hwy in Dandenong, has been sold to the Pellicano family business of over 50 years.
Owner David Kilderry said he’s disappointed for the community, staff and suppliers which were mostly local Dandenong suppliers.
“We wish Pellicano all the best but we still feel sad for the drive-in itself closing,” Mr Kilderry said.
Pellicano owns more than 180 properties and more than 360 commercial customers.
The privately owned company has a diverse portfolio with residential, commercial, retail, industrial and hospitality sectors.
Mr Kilderry and his brother bought the former Village site more than 20 years ago and have seen the drive-in grow tremendously.
“It was tough days in the early days when I, my brother and our other partner started.
“It took two or three years before we started to do better than break even, but for majority of that time it was a very good business.”
The Lunar drive-in has been an important place for generations of Victorians and Mr Kilderry said it was a big loss for the South-East.
“To be able to provide low-cost movies for South-East Melbourne, particularly for families and young people, it’s created an opportunity for low-cost entertainment where young people can come with their cars and enjoy a night supervised.”
The theatre caters for over 400,000 people annually, but Mr Kilderry said the land taxes did not help.
“We tried our best throughout the years but we can’t, if we continue past next year, we’ll be suffering large losses so it’s just impossible for us to continue and I just hope most of our customers do understand that.”
There are many projects the brothers are looking at for the future but Mr Kilderry said it was unlikely any would be in Dandenong.
“We’ve got some plans to do both together and individually, some of them involve the cinema industry and some of them don’t – we’re going to sit back and have a look.”
He said the cinema industry is not doing well at the moment so they’ll have to wait and see.
“We’ve got a number of projects but we’re not sharing those at the moment.
“The cinema industry is down so we’re waiting to see in… [2023] and the year after how the product settles down before we make any decisions,” Mr Kilderry said.
“Thank you to the Greater Dandenong community and we have just as many people come from Cranbourne and Berwick as we do from Dandenong and Noble Park areas, so we’ll miss our regular customers who’ve been very supportive.”
The Lunar drive-in would have a series of retro classics, along with the current releases, as they wind down.
Mr Kilderry said a date hadn’t been set but the Lunar drive-in would shut down mid-2023 somewhere in between May and July, which he said would be announced on the Lunar drive-in website and socials for locals.
