Adult Movie Theatres in Detroit

Michigan · last checked 24 September 2026

Detroit’s adult trade sits on 8 Mile Road, and the shop with the booths has been at the same address since 1963. The cinemas are all gone, but one of them did not get demolished like the rest. It got lifted onto seventy-two dollies and driven five blocks, and you can hire it for a wedding.

What is open right now

Uptown Book Store

Booth arcade

16401 West 8 Mile Road, Detroit, MI 48235

Booths: Video booths, around a hundred channels
Hours: 10am to 9pm Monday to Saturday, midday to 6pm Sunday
Phone: (313) 836-0647
Trading since: 1963

Between Greenfield and Southfield, and in business at that address since 1963, which makes it older than most of the cinemas in this directory ever managed. The booths take notes rather than tokens and the car park is gated and lit, which on that stretch of 8 Mile is a selling point the shop makes itself.

Last checked 24 September 2026 · Listing refreshed June 2026

The one they moved

The Gem Theatre in Detroit at its current location on Madison Street, a low brick and terracotta building with a vertical sign reading Little Gem Theatre, with Ford Field visible down the street behind it. — The Gem on Madison Street, where it has stood since 1997. The stadium district it was moved out of the way of is the block behind it. Photo Mikerussell, CC BY-SA 3.0.

The Gem, built as the Little Theatre alongside the Century Building, spent its last working years as a pornographic cinema and closed in 1978. Both buildings are on the National Register of Historic Places.

In 1997 the city wanted the ground for what became Comerica Park. The buildings were not knocked down. They were jacked up and rolled together onto seventy-two dollies, each carrying a fifty-ton jack, and moved 1,850 feet, about five blocks, at a cost of $5.5 million. The pair weighed 2,750 tons. It set the Guinness record for the farthest a major building had ever been moved.

At the time, the longest distance a major building had ever been moved, according to Guinness.

It sits at 333 Madison Street now, holds 456 people, and works as a wedding and corporate venue alongside the Century Theatre and the Century Club.

The others went the ordinary way. The Cine X on Woodward turned to pornographic films in 1968, closed in the mid-seventies and was demolished. The Garden Theatre on Woodward became the Peek-A-Rama and was renamed the Sassy Cat Adult Theatre on 12 December 1974. The Eastown ran adult films as the Showcase from 1980 and gave up in 1984. Of all of them, the porn house is the one still standing, because it was worth more as an object than as a business.

Sources

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