By Sahar Foladi
The remnant of the past, longest and largest running Lunar drive-in at 115 South Gippsland Hwy, 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 highlight to generations of Victorians and Mr Kilderry said this is a big loss for the South-East.
“To be able to provide low-cost movies for the South-East Melbourne, particularly for families and young people, it’s created an opportunity for a low-cost entertainment where young people can come with their cars and enjoy a night supervised.”
The theatre caters for over 400,000 people yearly, 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 is unlikely any will 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 was not doing well at the moment so they’d have to wait and see.
“We’ve got number of projects but we’re not sharing those at the moment.
“Cinema industry is down so we’re waiting to see in next year 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 will have a series of retro classics running as they head to closure along with the current releases.
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.
