After 7 Seasons and 200 Movies, Joe Bob Briggs Breaks Down The Last Drive-In Process (and Future) [Exclusive]

“Joe Bob keeps disco hours.”

It’s well past dinner time, and on the outskirts of Senoia, Georgia, the day is just getting started for The Last Drive-In With Joe Bob Briggs. This is the friendly word of warning I get from a member of the crew who picks up a cupcake from a nearby table. The team behind Shudder / AMC+’s hit series is filming a seasonal episode currently, and even though the weather doesn’t fit the theme, the excitement is still present. The fact that production is happening around the hour that fans watch the show seems like a deliberate choice.

“Well, it’s not so much that. It’s just that I’m a nightclub guy,” Briggs tells us in an interview after the fact. “I started doing shows in San Francisco back in the ‘80s when the show would start at nine o’clock at night. And you would go home and hide all your money in your hanging bag and go home at four in the morning. So I’m still on that nighttime schedule.”

Matt Manjourides, co-creator of The Last Drive-In and producer of the series through his production company with Justin Martell, Not the Funeral Home, added that the vibe of filming the show at night just feels right.

“It all kind of fits when you’re running between the office and the stage, and it’s dark out, and nobody else is around.”

Now nearing the end of its seventh season, with well over 200 movies shown and dissected by Joe Bob, the series shows no real signs of slowing down, but that doesn’t mean there still aren’t major challenges, like even finding the movies that they’re going to play. 

“Ironically, it hasn’t changed really since the first season,” Manjourides says of the selection process for The Last Drive-In’s movies.

One of the biggest hurdles remains securing the rights to mainstream, studio-produced horror movies, as major titles usually already have a home on another streaming service or the studio insists on a license that has a very short window, sometimes as short as just one month.

“Nobody wants a Joe Bob episode that’s only on for a month,” he adds. “You want to revisit it. We have the biggest rewatchable show on Shudder…The view numbers outdo brand new shows that drop. The rewatchability of our show is huge.”

The process really begins with the start of every season of the show as the team behind The Last Drive-In gets a list of either what’s available currently or what the team at Shudder / AMC+ can procure for them in the coming months. From there, Manjourides, his producing partner Justin, director Austin Jennings, and Joe Bob himself will take a look at the list and start to make pairs.

“It’s a little more difficult to get gold,” Manjourides admits. Briggs, though, sees this as an opportunity, adding, “The great thing about The Last Drive-In is that people are waiting for us to take them to a strange place.”

Part of this is because they at least want some movies that audiences are familiar with, because they want to hear Joe Bob talk about them, even with years of familiarity. Though which movies are going to air remains one of the most discussed and theorized parts of the series itself, it’s the commentary that Briggs and Darcy the Mail Girl (Diana Prince) bring to the table that keeps fans coming back and re-watching. Briggs says that the process for researching his monologues and anecdotes that he shares about the films has only gotten more and more complicated as the show has gone along, in part because of the eagle-eyed viewers.

“The Internet is monitoring you all the time for mistakes,” Briggs reveals. “And the Internet is also propagating most of the mistakes.”

Briggs remains a firm believer in “any source of information that’s not the Internet,” and for him that starts with his own writing and his personal library of books about films, filmmakers, Hollywood, actors and actresses, and the genre itself. He also has some help, revealing transcriptionist Rob Chipman, who goes through every bonus feature on every DVD for films that they’re going to show. He combines that with his assistant, Tracy Vonder Brink, who Briggs calls “an extremely good archivist and a writer” who surveys every piece of information about the movies that will be shown. There’s another key piece of the puzzle, scene-by-scene breakdowns of the movie that Briggs will use to help structure the writing of the show, and where he’ll break into the movie to talk to the audience.

“It’s an extremely lengthy process,” Briggs says. “It’s a whole thing where we try to be the Criterion Collection of cheap horror.”

Lest it sound fun, or like something that brings Briggs joy after his decades of journalism experience, he compares it to getting ready for a football game.

“Everything leading up to the football game, from the film room to the grueling two-a-day workouts, is hell. Nobody likes it. But now it’s time to play football, this is going to be fun.”

This Friday, they’ll debut Joe Bob’s Cruel Christmas, the seventh Christmas-season special from The Last Drive-In, which once again will include a double feature. For the special, the series will once again raise money for charity, bringing the fans aka the “Mutant Family” together to not only celebrate the genre they love but to spread a little bit of holiday cheer as they cap off 2025. They do this by auctioning off various prizes and opportunities, like last year’s auction for Joe Bob’s Christmas Carnage that included props from the set and even a movie night with Joe Bob and Darcy that sold for $10,000. Joe Bob reveals that this year’s event will include five charities benefiting the auction, up from the usual four.

“I always say, you know, who really needs it? Who really needs it? Well, the who really needs it list this year was nine miles long,” Briggs says. “Meals on Wheels might go out of business after 70 years…So I’m looking at all these charities and I’m going, this was a really bad year. And that’s why that’s how it became Cold Cruel Christmas. I’m going to rant a little about that when we start the show. But we’re going to try to set records for how much money we can raise for these charities that are literally on the verge of going out of business. It’s going to be funny. I’m not going to depress anybody with how depressing 2025 was.”

After Joe Bob’s Cruel Christmas, only two more episodes of The Last Drive-In are confirmed for Season 7 of the series, with double features planned for January and February. Briggs and Manjourides make no secret about the fact that the series lives season to season.

“As long as the fans are there, hopefully, we’ll keep going,” Manjourides says.

Though they’re never certain about the future, that doesn’t mean they don’t have plans about what they’ll do next. Briggs revealed he’s starting a testing ground of sorts for The Last Drive-In, working with AFS Cinema in Austin on something they’re calling “Satan’s Workshop.”

“I’m going to test out movies,” Briggs says. “You come to the theater and you see two movies that you probably never heard of, and I see if they’re audience killers or not and I don’t tell you what the movies are in advance…Then we choose which ones we’re going to actually air. So that’s sort of like you’re going to host them for a bigger audience in a live show.”

Manjourides has high hopes as well, like one idea they’ve considered for the past three years where they’d do an entire episode with puppets. The trouble with this one isn’t the availability of puppet-themed horror movies, but rather the logistics of how they’ll pull it off in production and keeping the spirit of the show, Briggs talking to the audience about the movie, intact. 

“We were thinking there’s a couple of horror puppet horror movies, what if we did a puppet of Joe Bob and Darcy and had them host?” Manjourides reveals. “The tricky thing is sometimes when we change the format, there’s a huge backlash from fans that get upset about it.”

Manjourides notes that the backlash that sometimes occurred is usually just about 20% of the audience, but it’s loud. He revealed that their most divisive episode was “Shot on Video” night, when they screened Things and Sledgehammer, where he says 50% of the audience hated it. That won’t stop him from thinking about doing it again, though. 

“I had to fight tooth and nail on that to get it out there. I’d love to do another one,” Manjourides says. “I would love to shoot the entire episode on video and make it just do it that way and shoot it analog. Of course, I would probably have some huge backlash from some fans.”

Playing with the format of The Last Drive-In isn’t the only thing on their bucket list though, as the team still have a number of titles they’d love to screen that are just difficult to nail down who even owns them. Manjourides specifically noted the Italian slasher movie Adam Chaplin as one example, which he calls “The Crow on steroids,” but also the cult film Black Devil Doll from Hell. Furthermore, they still would love to do another dusk till dawn till dusk marathon, maybe even showing all the Friday the 13th movies or Halloween movies they can. The logistics of that is where things become a problem, but that doesn’t mean they’ll stop thinking about it.

When The Last Drive-In started, it was supposed to just be a one night thing. An event that started at night and went to the next day where Briggs shared some of his favorite films with the audience. The success of that event, which crashed Shudder / AMC+’s servers, has given way to the most popular thing on the streaming platform. I asked Briggs if he had any ideas about what he’d like to do if he were able to plan ahead for the end, what the final episode of The Last Drive-In would be in his mind. Though he didn’t note any specific movies, Briggs knew immediately what the theme of that episode would be.

“If I did a final show I would probably celebrate the past because this amazing group of people, this fan base that’s formed around this show is truly amazing,” Briggs reveals. “They share a lot of their lives with me and I would talk about that. I’d tell several thousand really bad jokes to get them out of my files. But I don’t know, I don’t know for sure. But we would definitely celebrate the community that’s been built up around the show.”

Hopefully, he won’t have to nail down those specifics for a long time; after all, the drive-in will never die.