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Metallica Becomes First Non-Country Act to Film a Concert for Encore Live’s Drive-In Series

If you want to see and hear Metallica with strings, the group’s latest collaboration with the San Francisco Symphony, the live album/documentary “S&M2,” will be released for home entertainment August 28.

But if you want to experience Metallica with horns — car horns, that is — the band will be coming to drive-ins on August 29 with a one-night-only concert film.

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Their performance will mark the third presented on drive-in screens this summer by Encore Live, and the first to venture outside the country genre. The company’s two prior pandemic-era presentations featured Garth Brooks in June and Blake Shelton in July.

Like those predecessors, the Metallica show will be pre-recorded and appear on hundreds of outdoor screens, including a mixture of fixed drive-in theater locations and pop-ups.

The taping will capture Metallica’s first full concert performance since last September, when the group opened the Chase Center in San Francisco with a reunion with the symphony it paired with for the original “S&M” concerts and live album in 1999. The drive-in-focused show will ditch the orchestra for a traditional Metallica quartet set, “shot specially for the Encore Drive-In Nights Series at a location near the band’s Northern California headquarters.”

Ticket prices are $115 per carload, the same price point as for the recent Shelton one-nighter. One difference between this and the Brooks/Shelton shows is that each carload admission ticket, which is good for up to six people, will include four digital downloads of the “S&M2” album — a new wrinkle on the “ticket bundling” practice previously tied to on-sales for live concerts.

Presale tickets go on sale to Metallica’s fan club August 12 followed by a general on-sale August 14, at http://ticketmaster.com/encore-metallica. A full list of participating theaters or pop-ups will be put up at http://encorenights.com. With the previous two Encore Nights Drive-In shows, a majority of the 300-plus operating drive-in theaters in the United States and Canada opted to run with the concert program on at least one of their screens, along with dozens of the temporary locations that have been set up in the summer months for outdoor revival programming.

“We’ve seen with our first two Encore Nights Drive-In concerts that fans absolutely dig the drive-in experience, and we know that Metallica is going to blow the top off of this thing and take it to a whole new level,” said said Walter Kinzie, CEO of Encore Live, in a statement.

The group Three Days Grace will also appear as part of the filmed presentation as an “opening act.”

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