Quasar Drive-In Theater Brings Community Back to the Movies
Carloads of families start streaming into the Quasar Drive-In in Valley a couple of hours before showtime. Frisbees fly. Kids chase toads at the pond, climb the rescued vintage playground, and feed quarters into a throwback Galaga machine.
As the sun drops behind the dual screens, phones go in pockets and work weeks go on pause—for a few hours everyone’s attention falls on the screen they’re settled in front of.
“Once people come out, they see the atmosphere, the kids being allowed to roam…that’s really when they’re like, ‘I get it,’” said co-owner Jenny Karls. “We always say once we get them here, then we can keep them.”
The Quasar experience is the culmination of a dream Jeff and Jenny Karls cooked up on their honeymoon in 2013.
Jenny planned the couple’s trip around a stop in West Virginia to pick up a 1946 Ford sedan delivery—the same truck Jeff’s dad built when Jeff was a kid. Driving it home through Pennsylvania, they stumbled onto the Dependable Drive-In outside of Pittsburgh and talked about the family entertainment void back home with classic movie venues out of commission.
“We thought it would be cool to bring this back to Omaha, build it up and putter around with when we retire.”
The following summer, the couple took Jeff’s older kids in that same truck on a cross-country trip retracing the movie Cars along old Route 66—fulfilling a promise Jeff made years earlier while watching the film with them during the Council Bluffs Drive-Ins final season. A stop at the Tulsa Twin sealed it: they would build a drive-in of their own.
“That trip kind of galvanized our resolve to want to bring this back, because everywhere we went to a drive-in, it was the same block party atmosphere,” Jeff said. “It was like a community center for that city.”
They had no idea what it would take to get there.
First stop in 2015 was the United Drive-In Theatre Owners Association Convention in Orlando where the Karls learned the trade and slowly earned trust from a skeptical industry. “There’s a lot of gatekeeping with that group,” Jeff said. “You don’t want another drive-in to spring up six miles down the road from you. They were accepting once they figured out we were in earnest and not just drive-in theater fans.”
They found a promising piece of property in Gretna, but got “chased out of a city meeting with torches and pitchforks,” Jeff noted. So when Jenny spotted an auction sign for 40 acres in Valley in 2017, she did her homework. “I didn’t want a repeat of Gretna,” she said. “I started with city officials and asked if they would even consider it.” They spent two years navigating Douglas County and Nebraska DOT red tape before the deal was done.
The theater broke ground on March 15, 2020—the exact moment the world shut down. “That was when the movie industry changed forever,” Jeff said. “Every theater in the country except the drive-ins closed. So we had this great spotlight on what was still a construction project.”
When Quasar finally opened in May 2021, the spotlight had dimmed—everything else in town was reopening at the same time. “It was a bit of an anticlimactic launch,” Jeff said. “There was so much other noise about things to do, and everybody was chomping at the bit to get out and do them.”
Anticlimactic or not, 267 cars pulled in on opening night. “As green as we were at handling crowds, we thought we were going to tip over,” Jeff said. “Now, that’s just a decent night.”
That’s because the Karls have spent the past five years growing, adapting, and building more than a movie theater—starting with innovations such as Classics with a Cause.
As a single-screen operation initially, Quasar was boxed in by studio contracts that required them to run a new release every night they were open. Jeff wanted to do throwback nights; the studios wouldn’t allow it unless their contracted film stayed on screen. Jenny found a loophole: if it’s not ticketed, it’s not a contracted screening—it’s a private rental.
So, on Thursday nights, Quasar shows a classic film for free, but still staffs the box office and collects voluntary donations instead of ticket money. At the end of the night, the pot goes to a local cause such as the Millard South dance team, the Valley public library, and on one memorable night, to a local teen who needed the final $1,500 to purchase and train a diabetic alert dog. Cause night at the Quasar put him over his life-saving goal.
“It is the best test drive that somebody could ever get for the drive-in theater,” said Jenny, an architect whose love for the mid-century vibe is all over Quasar. “It’s a low-cost way to enjoy a movie that you already know you love.”
Other drive-in owners weren’t so sure. “You can’t give your product away,” they warned the Karls, certain the idea would backfire. Years later, Jeff doesn’t mind lauding Jenny’s idea: “Now, almost all of them have some night of the week that shares aspects of our Classics with a Cause.”
The growth hasn’t stopped there. A second screen officially makes Quasar a first-run twin drive-in theater—the next-nearest first-run drive-in is more than 150 miles away. The two screens now run dueling classics on Thursday nights.
The Quasar Bazaar, a recurring open-air flea market, draws 70-plus vendors a month. When a storm tore a panel off the screen last summer, the community rallied to help and had Quasar up and running again within two hours.
“God’s never given us more than we could handle,” Jeff said. “You’ve got to keep growing to survive. If you go stagnant, people stop coming.”
On a busy night these days, Quasar is buzzing with city kids stomping through the mud to chase toads, forgetting their tablets in the car while their parents get a break from a hectic week and form strong community ties. It’s the kind of thing the Karls still can’t get over.
“I love to walk out front during a busy show night and watch people interact with the thing that we made exactly as it was intended,” Jeff said. “We’re like, ‘yes—you understood the assignment completely.’”
