Old Murphy has spent the last four years parked next to a blank screen. The truck and its two-ton potato still catch daylight two miles south of Driggs, still get photographed by people slowing down on Highway 33, but there is nothing showing behind it. The screen that used to anchor the property, roughly 35 feet tall, came down in an April 2022 windstorm, gusts reaching 55 miles an hour, and the lot has sat mostly empty since, save for the truck out front and a scattering of residential trailers.
That changed on paper earlier this month. Teton County commissioners unanimously approved plans to rebuild the Spud, and the coverage since has framed it as simple good news: the drive-in is coming back. That's true, but it undersells what actually got approved. The project commissioners signed off on covers roughly 8.5 acres, about twice the footprint of the historic 4.2-acre theater. It adds a restaurant, a bar, ten campsites, and an event venue built for concerts and weddings. None of that existed at the old Spud, and none of it will be finished before the summer of 2028.
What Got Approved Isn't a Restoration
The original theater held up to 170 cars around a screen roughly 35 feet tall. The approved plan calls for a 55.5-foot screen tower, about 200 parking spaces, and a 3,300-square-foot restaurant and concession building. That building has a name already: Murph's Mountain Diner, a nod to the truck out front that farmers in Teton Valley have long nicknamed for their potatoes.
The approval actually rests on two separate permits. The county approved a campground permit back in 2024 for ten Airstream-style trailers on the property. The permit granted this month covers everything else: the drive-in, the screen, the restaurant, concessions, parking, and events. Developer Tom Hedges, part owner with MD Spud LLC, has said the plan is to keep the pieces longtime visitors remember while building around them in phases, starting with the screen and the movies before anything else comes online.
Why the Lot Sat Empty for Four Years
The delay wasn't about money or construction crews. MD Nursery, which owns the surrounding landscaping business along Highway 33, bought the Spud in August 2023, more than a year after the screen went down, specifically because it wanted to keep the theater running. What stalled the rebuild after that was zoning. The property sits on a grandfathered parcel that never fell under the county's current land-use code, and drive-in theaters weren't a recognized permitted use anywhere in that code. Before MD Nursery could get a building permit, Teton County had to amend its land-use rules to formally allow drive-ins as a use category at all. That hearing happened in March 2026, a full four years after the storm, and it's the reason nothing visible happened on the property for so long despite an owner ready to build.
A Timeline Longer Than the Approval Suggests
Grading and infrastructure work could start as early as October 1, weather permitting, but that's the beginning of a multi-year sequence, not the end of one. Construction pauses over the winter and resumes in April 2027. The goal is to have movies playing again by August 2027, with food served from temporary trucks while the permanent building goes up. Murph's Mountain Diner itself doesn't break ground until May 2027 and isn't expected to open until June 2028.
So the honest version of the timeline is this: residents will likely see dirt moving this fall, nothing at all over next winter, a screen and parking lot by late summer 2027, and a finished restaurant and bar roughly a year after that. Anyone picturing a reopening next Fourth of July is picturing the wrong summer, and the one after that too.
What the Neighbors Asked For
The property borders the Mountain Meadows subdivision, and the written comments filed ahead of the September hearing show a community negotiating specifics, not just cheering a nostalgic return. Mike and Kathryn Brown, who live in Mountain Meadows, asked the county to draw a hard line between a movie screening and a concert. Past concerts at the Spud had brought late-night noise, added traffic, and attendees wandering into residential streets, and the Browns wanted concerts capped at 10 p.m. with clarity on whether each event would need its own approval. Linsay and Aidan Alexander, whose bedroom faces the property, said they welcomed the drive-in back but worried amplified events could run until midnight, along with dust and litter from a busier site.
Not everyone pushed back. Lloyd and Ronda Moss called the Spud an iconic cultural landmark and argued the restaurant and event space would create jobs and give the valley a gathering place again. Nikki Richards, executive director of the nonprofit Valley Advocates for Responsible Development, supported the permit but asked commissioners to write the safeguards into the approval itself rather than leave them as goodwill.
The conditions that made it into the final approval reflect that back and forth:
- A southbound left-turn lane and a northbound right-turn lane from Highway 33 into the property's northern entrance, required before the project can open
- Screening around the site with fencing and landscaping, including large trees, to buffer the theater from neighboring homes
- Speakers required to face downward and toward the center of the property rather than outward
Hedges has framed the screening requirements as part of the design from the start, saying the plan was to do a good job of enclosing the theater with fencing and landscaping and to keep sound contained on site. Whether that satisfies neighbors who've already lived through noisier stretches will likely depend on how the event calendar actually gets used once concessions and concerts are both back in play.
The Parts That Aren't Changing
For all the growth in scale, the elements that made the Spud a landmark in the first place predate any of this. Ace Wood, who already ran an indoor theater in Driggs called the Orpheum, built the Spud in 1953 because he wanted to bring the automobile culture of the era to Teton County. The giant potato didn't show up until 1987, when new owners Richard and Dawnelle Wood mounted a plaster spud on a 1946 Chevy flatbed after seeing a postcard of a similar roadside gag elsewhere. In 1992, a group of kids cracked the original potato apart, and the valley's response wasn't outrage that faded, it was a fundraiser that brought in more than a thousand dollars to rebuild the potato out of sturdier material and bolt it to the truck bed for good. The theater earned a spot on the National Register of Historic Places in 2003, with the nomination specifically citing the 1953 screen tower, ticket booth, and parking ramps as intact historic features.
That history is why the project reads differently than a typical entertainment development. The county isn't approving a new concert venue on raw land. It's approving an expansion around a building people already have decades of memories inside, which is likely why the debate over noise and traffic has been so specific rather than a blanket objection to the whole idea.
What This Looks Like on the Ground
By August 2027, if the timeline holds, cars will pull into a parking lot nearly twice the size of the one that closed in 2022, facing a screen twenty feet taller than the original, with food coming from trucks parked where a permanent restaurant will eventually stand. The turn lanes required by the county will be the first formal traffic infrastructure Highway 33 has had at that entrance since the theater opened in 1953. Old Murphy will presumably still be parked out front, because nothing in the approved plans touches the truck or the potato, only everything around them.
Harland Brothers Real Estate keeps an eye on projects like the Spud rebuild because they shape how a place feels years before they show up in any transaction. If you're curious about what else is changing across Teton Valley and want the version grounded in what's actually been approved rather than what's assumed, Harland Brothers Real Estate is a good place to start that conversation.
