Adult Movie Theatres in Lansing

Michigan · last checked 23 October 2026

In 1973 a cinema on West Jolly Road opened with Deep Throat, got shut by the police for four months, and put the words Rated PG, Police Harassment on its marquee while it waited. That building is still in this trade today. What is open now is a play club across town that caught fire, was written off as dead by its own regulars, and came back half the size.

What is still open

Club Tabu

Play space

3208 South Martin Luther King Jr Boulevard, Lansing, MI 48910

What it is: A play club, with a swingers side and a BDSM area
Entry: $30 cover, on an all-day rate
Hours: 10am to 10pm most days, and to 4am on two nights
Size: About half what it was, after a fire
Phone: (517) 393-1159

Not a cinema or an arcade. A club with rooms, where people go to watch each other or take part, with a swingers side and a BDSM area. It is the only venue of its kind in this directory so far and it has had a hard three years.

The fire. It burned, closed for more than a year, and the owner said it would be repaired and blamed the city for the delays. By January 2025 a customer had given up and posted its obituary, wondering when the for sale sign would go up. It reopened that July at half its old footprint, which the reviewer attributed to fire regulations.

Go in knowing it is quiet. Somebody in January 2026 paid the thirty dollar cover and counted four to seven people on a Friday night, against what the place used to draw. He blamed local politics for it and the business told him to learn the facts before passing judgement. We have no way of settling that and we are not going to try.

The owner does answer. Somebody asked what to expect on a Saturday night as a first-timer and the owner replied: expect it to be busy. That sits awkwardly against the man who counted seven people in on a Friday, and both are on the same listing. Another asked whether they open on Friday nights and was told yes.

A customer in March 2026 still wanted somebody to explain how the rooms work before turning up, which the answers above do not quite do. If that is you, phone first. Note also that the listing’s own description is for an adult shop called Fantasies Unlimited, so there is retail attached to this address as well as the club.

Last checked 23 October 2026 · Reopening described 27 July 2025; still being reviewed in March 2026

Not counted. Deja Vu Love Boutique at 1000 West Jolly Road, (517) 882-0236, trades 10am to 2am and its own website mentions a theatre. Not one customer has ever described a room there. Read the history below before you dismiss the address, though, because it is the whole point of this page. Cirilla’s in Lansing is a shop.

Shirley’s Backroom out at the M66 and I96 interchange at Ionia, forty miles west, is the one case here we went back and forth on. It is listed with private booths and gloryholes and it is the top result for exactly the search that finds rooms. But the only description of the inside is from January 2012, and the one recent review, from June 2026, says the owner was accommodating when the writer went years ago. Fourteen-year -old evidence is not evidence of a room today, so we are not counting it, and we are telling you it exists so you can ring (269) 838-1140 and ask.

The Lion’s Den at Perry, twenty miles east, trades 10am to midnight and is a good shop by every account, and nobody has mentioned a room in it. That matches what the chain itself keeps telling customers in Columbus, where it was founded: some stores have arcades, and the ones near home do not.

Rated PG, Police Harassment

Cinema X

Closed

1000 West Jolly Road, Lansing, MI 48910

Opened: 23 February 1973, with Deep Throat
Closed by police: About four months, that same year
The marquee read: Rated PG - Police Harassment
Twinned: 1979
Closed: 1988
Now: The Deja Vu Love Boutique, at the same address

It opened with the film, on the day, and the police came for it inside the first year. The closure lasted about four months. Rather than take the sign down, whoever ran the place used it: the marquee carried a certificate that does not exist, with the words spelled out underneath.

A local who was there remembers it advertising on a Lansing Top 40 station in 1974, and a private school dropping that station for its snow closure announcements because of the adverts. During the shutdown the cinema also ran a short rhyming poem in the Lansing State Journal, ending with the line that it was sorry, closed until further notice. Both of those are one man’s recollection fifty years later, and we like them enough to print them with that attached.

Last checked 23 October 2026

That marquee is the only joke in this entire directory. Everywhere else the response to enforcement is a court case, a fine, a quiet closure or a renaming. In Lansing somebody looked at a four month police shutdown and decided the funniest available move was to give it a rating.

Fifty-three years at one address

Here is the part that makes this page worth reading twice. The Cinema X closed in 1988. The building at 1000 West Jolly Road is now the Deja Vu Love Boutique, and it has been open at that address through this entire directory’s research.

Deja Vu is Harry Mohney’s chain, built out of a failing drive-in at Durand, sixty miles east of here, by a projectionist who put adult films on the whole marquee in the mid-1960s. By 1973 he had more than a hundred businesses across ten states. The Cinema X opened that February.

So the building that fought the Lansing police over Deep Throat in 1973 is owned by the company that grew out of the Michigan drive-in that started the trade, and it is still selling the same thing on the same spot. Across this directory a surviving adult building almost always means something respectable took it over: a church in Spokane, a concert hall in Knoxville, an arts annex in Lexington, an oil change in Albany. This one never left the trade at all.

Six cities, one film

Deep Throat turns up as the hinge on page after page of this directory. Lansing is the only city where a cinema opened with it.

Knoxville saw it first, in late 1972, at a cinema that later burned. Grand Rapids opened a new adult screen with it on 30 March 1973. Wilkes-Barre had a screening stopped by the district attorney that September. Syracuse fined a man $26,878 for it and he paid rather than stop. Spokane seized a print in 1977 and lost every trial. Lansing shut a cinema for four months and got a joke painted on a marquee for its trouble.

Sources

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