Adult Movie Theatres in Atlanta

Georgia · last checked 23 September 2026

Atlanta is one of the few American cities where the answer is not “nothing”. There is no traditional cinema left, but one street still has two venues running around the clock, four miles north-east of downtown. Cheshire Bridge Road survived two attempts by the city council to legislate it away.

What is open right now

Tokyo Valentino Erotique

Play space

1739 Cheshire Bridge Road NE, Atlanta, GA 30324

Booths: 20 video booths
Rooms: Open and private play rooms, showers, lockers, bedrooms
Hours: 24 hours, closed Wednesdays 2am to 10am
Admission: $18 weekday daytime, $21 evenings and weekends, $25 Friday and Saturday nights
Phone: (404) 875-9200

Not a cinema and not just an arcade. Twenty booths, open and private play rooms, shower and locker and massage rooms, and private bedrooms with leather day beds. You pay at the door and the price changes with the night, which is what puts it in the play space column rather than with the theatres.

If you have seen this listed as Inserection, that is the same building under its old name. Michael Morrison’s business was rebranded, not replaced, and plenty of directories still carry both as though they were two venues at one address.

Last checked 23 September 2026 · Listing refreshed August 2026, 151 reviews

Southern Nights Adult Video

Booth arcade

2205 Cheshire Bridge Road NE, Atlanta, GA 30324

Arcade: 64 channels on 42-inch screens
Hours: 24 hours, seven days
Phone: (404) 728-0701

Half a mile up the same road, and the straightforward version: a shop with a video arcade at the back, open all night, every night.

Last checked 23 September 2026 · Listing refreshed August 2026, 30 reviews

Tokyo Valentino also runs a second Atlanta location at 850 Northside Drive with booths and bedrooms, open 10am to 2am, and retail-only shops in Brookhaven, Duluth and Marietta with nothing to sit down for.

The street the city kept voting on

Cheshire Bridge Road picked up its adult businesses through the 1970s and never let them go. By the 2000s the strip held sex shops, strip clubs both straight and gay, the Cheshire Motor Inn, a men-only private club called the Den, and gay nightclubs including B.J. Roosters, Xion, the Heretic and the Jungle. Then the neighbourhood around it got expensive.

2005The city council bans any new adult business from opening on Cheshire Bridge Road. The ones already there are allowed to stay.
2013Councilman Alex Wan introduces legislation to remove the existing businesses by 2018, backed by the neighbourhood associations. It fails.
2021A fire under the Cheshire Bridge overpass closes the road to through traffic for more than a year. No vote required.

Two votes and a fire. The fire did more damage than either vote.

The 2013 bill is the interesting one. It would have cleared the existing businesses out by 2018 and it had the neighbourhood associations behind it. What stopped it was an unusual coalition, described at the time as a mix of gay residents, strippers and Atlanta’s real estate interests, and the argument was not really about zoning. It was about whether a city should have anywhere left for this at all.

Development has done quietly what the votes could not. Several venues and clubs on the strip were pressured to close or move around 2020 as high-density housing arrived.

The cinemas, and the one that got out

Atlanta had proper adult houses and lost them early. The Kirkwood was the first in the city to run adult films full-time, from 27 April 1962; it closed in the sixties and was demolished in 1985.

The Ashley Art opened on 30 October 1970 at 293 Peachtree Street, showing 16mm, men only, with the first screening at 10am and the last starting at midnight. Admission was $5 when an ordinary cinema ticket was $2. It had a bright yellow front painted with nude silhouettes and it sat between a gay bar and a topless club, on a block with three churches on it. The whole block came down for John Portman’s 1 Atlantic Center.

The Plaza Theatre on Ponce de Leon Avenue in Atlanta at night, its art deco facade and marquee lit in neon. — The Plaza on Ponce de Leon. X-rated films and live burlesque through the 1970s, an arthouse since the shopping centre was renovated, and still the oldest cinema in Atlanta. Photo Marc Merlin, CC BY-SA 4.0.

The Plaza is the one that got out. It opened on 23 December 1939, a George Harwell Bond art deco house on Ponce de Leon Avenue, ran X-rated films and live burlesque through the seventies, and then went straight. Its balcony became a second screen in 1983. It is now a non-profit showing indie, foreign, cult and horror films, and it is the oldest cinema in Atlanta and the only independent one left.

Worth being clear, because search results are not: the Plaza is a normal cinema today. If you turn up expecting what it was in 1975 you will be watching a restored print of something with an audience that came for the film.

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