The Twister Drive-In Theater Is Officially Gone

There are a surprising number of places across Oklahoma that Hollywood made famous.

The Outsiders house in Tulsa is iconic. The Guthrie gas station from Rain Man. Wakita, the town Hollywood built to destroy in Twister... and also from that film, the Beacon Drive-In Theater.

If the name doesn't ring a bell, the giant movie screen probably will.

For some, the Beacon was just the local old drive-in theater. For others, it was the drive-in theater that got absolutely obliterated by a tornado in Twister.

Not a real tornado, obviously, but the CGI was impressive for 1996.

It's one of the most iconic scenes in Oklahoma movie history.

For years, people would stumble across photos of the Beacon and immediately recognize it. Maybe they had never been there. Maybe they didn't even know it was in Guthrie. They just knew they'd seen that giant screen flying through the air somewhere before.

Now, officially in 2026, it's gone.

It was sold earlier this year and has recently been demolished down to the dirt, ending a run that stretched back more than seven decades. The property is becoming the new home to an Oklahoma-based credit union, which is probably about the least exciting sentence ever written after mentioning Twister.

The funny thing isn't that the Beacon survived the fictional tornado. In real life, it survived changing movie trends and the collapse of drive-in theaters across America.

It even survived long enough to become a roadside piece of Oklahoma movie history. Gone forever.

I suppose, keeping with the dramatic theme, it's an ending befitting an icon.