Adult Movie Theatres in Colorado Springs

What is still open

Not counted. First Amendment at Fillmore at 220 East Fillmore Street, (719) 630-7676, trades 8am to 2am, which is right up to the legal limit, and its own site mentions adult movies. Nobody has described a room in it. The name is the best in this directory and we would love to count it, but we are not going to. The two Romantix shops, on Austin Bluffs Parkway and Drennan Road, mention adult films on the company site and have no room anybody has written about, unlike the Romantix stores in Denver and Battle Creek, which do.

The rule, in its own words

Across this directory we have met the same three measures again and again. Doors cut short. One person to a booth. A hard closing time. Operators describe them, customers complain about them, and the actual text is usually somewhere we have not read.

Here it is.

The second and third lines are the whole mechanism of this trade. Not a ban. A sightline. Somebody must be on duty at a fixed station whenever anyone is inside, and the building must be arranged so that from that station they can see every part of it a customer can walk into.

Everything this directory has recorded follows from that one requirement. The Toledo operator whose booth doors were cut down and who told a customer in public that it was the law, and that they found out the hard way, was describing exactly this. So is the one-man-per-booth rule in Charlotte. Two people in a booth with a closed door is the thing the sightline exists to prevent.

And read the restroom clause again, because somebody had to write it: no film or video equipment in the lavatories. That is a rule made in response to something that actually happened.

Thirty-four years of one ordinance

The city council passed the Sexually Oriented Business Licensing Ordinance on 24 November 1992, effective 17 December 1992. Its definitions cover adult arcades, adult bookstores, adult video stores, adult cabarets, adult motels, adult motion picture theatres, adult theatres and sexual encounter establishments. The council’s stated reasons were crime, property values and neighbourhood character, which is the same list every city in this directory used.

Bookshop and theatre operators took it to court, and in 1995 the Colorado Supreme Court decided City of Colorado Springs v. 2354 Inc. The trial court had found the ordinance unenforceable on First Amendment grounds. The Supreme Court held that some of its provisions are not facially unconstitutional and affirmed in part and reversed in part. We have not read the full opinion and cannot tell you which clauses fell.

Then it kept being amended: 1999, 2001, and again last month. Ordinance 26-54, passed in September 2026 and effective 5 October 2026, renamed the licence an Adult Use Business License. Two weeks before this page was written.

That is the thing most of this site misses because it is looking at buildings. The cinemas closed decades ago and the ordinance is still being maintained, line by line, for a trade that in this city now amounts to one arcade on East Platte Avenue.

What we could not establish

Colorado Springs is the headquarters of the American evangelical movement. Focus on the Family moved here in 1991, the year before this ordinance, and the obvious page to write is the one where those two facts are the same fact.

We looked and we could not support it. Nothing we found shows that organisation lobbying for, drafting or campaigning for the adult business ordinance. The group tied to the 1992 Amendment 2 campaign in the records we read is Colorado for Family Values, and that campaign was about something else. The council minutes from late 1992 and the local newspaper from that winter would settle it and we have not seen either.

So the honest version is this. A city with a very large religious conservative presence passed a licensing ordinance in 1992, defended most of it in court in 1995, and has maintained it ever since. Those things are true and sit next to each other. We are not going to invent the line between them.