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Adult Movie Theatres

Adult Movie Theatres Near You

Nobody has counted these since 1989. There is no census, no trade body, and no directory that has been checked in the last decade, so we are counting them ourselves, one city at a time: what is still open, what kind of place it actually is, what used to be there, and when it went.

Venues confirmed open
87
Cities researched
65
across 44 states
With nothing left
15
named, with the nearest alternative

Every venue carries the date we last checked it and the source that confirmed it. Nothing is listed as open on the strength of a listing alone, and a city with none left says so plainly rather than padding the page.

Find your city

Cities with venues open (50)

Cities with nothing left (15)

Twenty, then seven hundred and fifty, then almost none

In 1960 there were about twenty cinemas in the United States showing erotic films and nothing else. Ten years later there were 750. They existed because, for one narrow decade, a room with a projector was the only place on earth you could see a hardcore film.

the series stops here2019607501970under 2501989Adult cinemas in the United States
Three counts, twenty-nine years apart, from Wikipedia. Those are the last national figures anyone produced.

Then the video recorder made that untrue, and the internet made it untrue twice. By 1989 there were fewer than 250, and the counting stopped. The best global list in existence since is a side category on a volunteer site about historic cinema buildings, with 124 entries marked open, and it is demonstrably incomplete: it carries one or two Dutch venues against a country that has around sixty.

That gap is what the figures at the top of this page are for. Thirty-five venues across twenty-five cities is not a national total and we would not pretend otherwise, but it is a real count of real places, each one dated and sourced, and it is the first anybody has published in a very long time.

The neon marquee of a former adult cinema in San Diego at night, now reading Ghirardelli Ice Cream and Chocolate Shop.
What usually happened to them. This is 643 Fifth Avenue in San Diego: the Casino, run by the Pussycat chain in the early seventies, now an ice cream shop under its own original marquee. Photo Frank Schulenburg, CC BY-SA 4.0.

Four different places, one search term

“Adult theatre” means something different depending on where you are standing, and nobody separates them, which is why a search for one returns a list mixing cinemas, sex shops and toy stores. Every venue here is labelled with which of these it is, because knowing what you are driving to is most of what you wanted to find out.

  • TheatreSeats, a screen, an audience. What the phrase means in Europe and South America, and what almost nothing in America is any more.
  • Booth arcadePrivate booths behind a shop, usually a few dollars for a token or a card. The most common surviving form in the United States.
  • Play spaceRooms, lockers, showers, admission at the door. A club that happens to have a screen somewhere in it.
  • ClosedGone, and when. Listed anyway, because half of what is online about this scene is about places that shut years ago.

Nobody goes to any of them for the film, and the record has been blunt about that for fifty years: the rules on what happens in the seats are lax, condoned or simply tolerated. We report what a venue is and leave the rest to you.

Where they actually survive

Far better outside America than inside it. The Netherlands has around sixty and is the densest country on earth for them. Japan keeps them in the entertainment districts of Tokyo, Osaka and Nagoya, thinning out as the buildings and the managers age. The largest clusters anywhere are in South America: São Paulo, Buenos Aires, Rio. There are real ones left in Rome, Vienna, Zurich, Antwerp, Paris, Manila, Bangkok and Melbourne.

In most American cities the honest answer is that there is nothing left, and the useful part of that answer is how far you would have to drive. Burlington, Vermont is a hundred miles from a cinema in Montreal. That is still a better answer than anyone else gives.

How we check

Every venue carries the date we last checked it, and every page lists its sources. That is not standard practice here. The big listing sites will flag a venue demolished in the eighties as “Open”, and this is the main thing we are offering.

  1. A name match is a lead, never a fact. There is a “Boston” adult arcade whose address turns out to be Boston Avenue in Bridgeport, Connecticut.
  2. Two venues at one address means one listing is dead. Resolved before either gets published.
  3. Nothing is called open without a dated signal from the last few months. A venue’s own website is not evidence. Plenty still display COVID notices.
  4. Enthusiast guides are leads only. They are the most current source in this scene and the least verified. Used to find a place, confirmed elsewhere, and the elsewhere is what gets cited.
  5. What cannot be verified is said plainly as unverified, or left out. Never smoothed into a fact, and never rounded up.

We do not review or rate venues. We have a competing one of our own, and rating them would be both dishonest and obvious. If something here is wrong or has gone stale, tell us and it gets checked.