Adult Movie Theatres in South Bend

Indiana · last checked 23 October 2026

One place is open here and it is worth the page on its own, because it says out loud what every other venue in this directory leaves you to work out. It sells buddy rooms and couples rooms, by name, and the business itself uses those words in public. The booths lock. Nobody is pretending the point is the movie.

What is still open

Romantix

Booth arcade

2715 South Main Street, South Bend, IN 46614

Has: An arcade of private booths that lock
Also: Buddy rooms and couples rooms
Hours: 11am to midnight, and to 1am one night
Phone: (574) 291-1899

A customer wrote in February 2025 that the buddy rooms are great and the couples rooms the best he has seen. Three days later the business replied and thanked him for sharing his experience of their buddy and couples rooms.

That exchange is the most useful thing on this entire site. Forty cities of cut-down doors, one-person rules, sightline codes, token machines and ten dollar doors, and here is a company simply naming the two kinds of room it rents and which one is for whom.

Buddy room
A room meant for two men. Sold under that name here, and the business uses the term itself.
Couples room
Described by a customer in February 2025 as the best he has seen. Again the business names it.
Private booth that locks
Recorded in March 2022, with the advice to lock yours. Compare Troy, New York, where the shop confirmed the same thing in answer to a direct question.

Three named products, none of which is a film.

The address is older than the sign. A man who has been coming for three decades wrote in November 2025 that he remembers it as the Adult Emporium, and another name before that, and that he had his first experience with a man here thirty years ago. The chain name over the door has changed at least twice. The booths have not.

Practical notes from the reviews: it is hard to find, clean and well lit inside, the staff are repeatedly described as helpful without being pushy, and if you buy a DVD, check it before the thirty days are up.

Last checked 23 October 2026 · Rooms named by the business on 17 February 2025; reviewed again 15 August 2026

Not counted. Cirilla’s in South Bend is a shop. The Lion’s Den at Sawyer, Michigan, thirty miles up Interstate 94, trades 10am to midnight and is well liked, and in eleven reviews going back to 2007 not one person mentions a room. That is the third Lion’s Den in this directory with no arcade anybody has described, after Perry and the Ohio stores on the Columbus page, where the company kept telling customers which of its shops have arcades and which do not.

Sixty miles west in Gary there is another Romantix where a customer describes an adult theatre and the people sitting next to him. That is Chicago’s end of the state and out of scope here.

Six hundred cars, and then somebody set fire to it

Chippewa Drive-In

Closed

500 West Chippewa Avenue, South Bend, IN 46614

Opened: 8 July 1951, as the Moonlite Outdoor Theatre, with Danny Kaye in On the Riviera
Capacity: 600 cars
Twinned: 4 June 1976
Went adult: 1982 or 1984, depending on the account
1984: Deep Throat, outdoors, for an entire season
First fire: November 1985, heavy damage to the concession stand
Closed: 13 July 1988, after an arson attack destroyed it
Now: A sixteen-screen multiplex

A full-size drive-in, six hundred cars, that spent its last years showing pornography on a screen you could see from the road. One contributor says it ran Deep Throat outdoors for a whole season in 1984, twelve years after the film came out.

It burned twice. The concession stand was heavily damaged in November 1985 and the building was destroyed by an arson attack in July 1988, which is when it closed for good. The cinema record states the arson plainly rather than as a rumour, though it is still a community-edited entry and we have not seen a fire report.

The dates for when it turned adult do not agree. The main listing says 1984 and a contributor citing a South Bend Tribune listing says 28 May 1982. We have not seen the newspaper.

Last checked 23 October 2026

This is the second adult drive-in in this directory and the second arson. The first drive-in is the Fiesta in El Paso, which has been showing adult films outdoors since October 1981 and is still open this morning. The first arson is in Knoxville, where a contributor says the Gay Street Cinema was finished off with a firebomb in 1975.

Put those three together and the pattern is uncomfortable. Two of the three adult venues in this directory that ended abruptly ended in a fire, and the one that was never burned is the one still trading.

And the one downtown that nobody can agree about

The Avon at 319 South Michigan Street opened in 1949, became the Avon Art Theatre in 1958, was renamed the Mall Theatre in 1975 and stopped showing films on 25 January 1979. It stood empty for thirty-three years and was demolished in November 2012.

What it actually showed is disputed by the people who remember it. One says that in the early to mid-1960s it ran soft-core European films and then went back to independent and art cinema late in the decade. Another says it degenerated into a porn theatre in the 1970s as downtown declined. A third says the Mall showed a variety of films and was by no means exclusively X-rated.

We are leaving that unresolved, because it is three people’s memories and no record. The art house turning adult is the single most common story on this site, from Allentown to Lexington, which makes it exactly the kind of thing we would be tempted to assume. The South Bend Tribune archive would settle it.

Sources

Something here wrong or out of date? Tell us and we will check it.

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