Metallica Announced For Aug. 29 ‘Encore Drive-In Nights’ Simulcast Concert

Metallica in the round
Courtesy of Live Nation GSA – Metallica in the round

Metallica’s first concert of 2020 will take place Aug. 29 as part of the Encore Drive-In Nights concert series simulcast to hundreds of drive-in and outdoor theatres across the U.S. and Canada.

The show will be shot specifically for the drive-in performance, which is described as a full set featuring music from the band’s four-decade catalog, and subsequently be edited and mixed by Metallica’s production team. Three Days Grace will serve as the official Encore Drive-In Nights opening act for the Aug. 29 show, which will be a one-night showing. 
Tickets will include four digital downloads of Metallica’s S&M2, which was recorded over two nights of the band opening up the new Chase Center in San Francisco accompanied by the SF Symphony Orchestra as a 20-year reprise of the band’s landmark S&M release. 
Pre-sale tickets available to Metallica’s Fifth Member fan club go on sale Aug. 12 at ticketmaster.com/encore-metallica, with general on-sale starting Aug. 14. Each ticket purchase admits one carload of up to six people.
“In all of rock, it literally doesn’t get any bigger than Metallica,” said Walter Kinzie, CEO of Encore Live. “Over the course of their career these guys have completely redefined rock, touring and frankly what’s possible in terms of success in this industry. 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.”
With performances by Garth Brooks and Blake Shelton already under its belt, Encore Live partners with drive-in theaters across the country for the concert series,  with venues adhering to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommended guidelines as well as all state and local health mandates. Staff will wear personal protective equipment and enforce at least six feet of space between cars. The series will also use contactless payment and ticketing systems and limit capacity in restrooms. 
The drive-in concert has become the biggest in-person event since COVID-19, with big boxoffice reports coming in from comedian Bert Kreischer, Christian band Casting Crowns, Andrew McMahon and others showing the strong demand for live music despite the pandemic. 
Metallica has solidified its place as in a class of its own in the heavy metal realm and one of the biggest touring bands on the planet, pushing the bar on production and performance as a well-oiled machine that can tour stadiums at will, worldwide, with nearly 22.1 million total tickets and grossed some $1.4 billion since 1982 according to Pollstar data.
That touring prowess has continued to grow, in part thanks to the band’s two-weeks-on, two-weeks-off schedule and switching between arenas, stadiums and festivals by year. 
“We have found a way for it to work for us in terms of how we tour, the amount of shows that we play, and how we play them,” Metallica founding member and drummer Lars Ulrich told Pollstar for a 2019 cover story. “We played these shows in sort of two-week increments, which gives us a chance to sort of look at the long game rather than how we’d go out and play, you know, 100 shows over 130 days, and then we all fall over and can’t deal with the physical and mental fatigue of it.” 
“If touring is one of the things we do, I don’t necessarily look at it like the tour’s never-ending, you know, it’s just this tour will just roll over into something else, which will roll over into something else.”
The band had been announced as headlining two nights of each of Danny Wimmer Presents’ five major rock festivals in 2020, although it was later announced James Hetfield was seeking addiction treatment and would miss a couple of the shows, and then the festivals were eventually called off for 2020 due to the coronavirus pandemic.