Adult Movie Theatres in San Diego

What is open right now

Two places the search results will still send you to

The Romantix at 4792 El Cajon Boulevard is closed; its listing was updated as recently as July 2026 and says so. F Street Adult Video & Gifts at 7865 Balboa Avenue has been marked closed since December 2025. Both are still carried as open by guides that have not been through their own entries in years.

That is the normal state of information about this scene. The enthusiast guides are the most current thing in existence and the least checked; the mainstream listings will flag a venue demolished in the eighties as “Open”. Every venue above carries the date it was last looked at, and the sources are at the bottom.

Six downtown, four of them Pussycats

The first Pussycat Theater opened on South Hill Street in Los Angeles in March 1966. Within two years the chain ran nearly a dozen houses between San Diego and San Francisco, and San Diego got more of them than its size warranted.

The San Diego Pussycat opened on 3 April 1968 at Fourth and F, purpose-built rather than converted, and ran from noon until half past five in the morning. Pussycat also took over three existing downtown cinemas and kept their names: the Cabrillo on Horton Plaza, running three features that rotated twice a week; the Aztec at 665 Fifth; and the Casino at 643 Fifth, the one below. Two independents filled in the rest of the block: the Lux at 728 Fifth, opened by John Antonelli under the Neptune Hotel, and the Foxy at 655, purpose-built XXX in about 1977 with two screening rooms and, by the nineties, VHS projectors.

The city took the block

Most American adult cinemas were killed by the video recorder. San Diego’s were killed by a redevelopment agency.

On 31 December 1979 the city’s Redevelopment Agency filed eminent domain proceedings against the adult businesses on lower Fourth Avenue. The Pussycat closed in 1981. The Cabrillo, open since 1 March 1915 with 600 seats, was demolished in 1982. What stands on that ground now is Horton Plaza.

The Fifth Avenue houses went more slowly and more quietly. The Aztec lasted until 1994. The Lux was still running adult films into at least the mid-eighties and is an Italian restaurant now. Nobody agrees when the Foxy shut: accounts put it anywhere between 1987 and about 2000. The block around it was listed on the National Register in 1980 and rebranded as the Gaslamp Quarter, which is the other way a district like this ends.

The chain outlived the city’s patience by forty years. After Vince Miranda died in 1985 the Pussycats went to creditors or turned respectable, and by 2003 one was left, in West Hollywood. It closed on 29 October 2022.