Adult Movie Theatres in Lincoln

What is open in Lincoln

No viewing room, no booth arcade and no adult cinema anywhere in Lincoln or in Lancaster County. The nearest booths and the nearest theatre are in Council Bluffs, Iowa, the far side of Omaha. Address and hours are on the Omaha page.

These six are retail, and all six trade:

• Romantix, 2929 NW 12th Street

  10am to 1am, Friday and Saturday to 3am · (402) 475-6914

• Romantix, 3247 S 10th Street

  Noon to midnight, Thursday to Sunday to 1am · (402) 858-9143

• Love Unlimited, 4815 Old Cheney Road, Suite A

  10am to midnight, Friday and Saturday to 1am · (531) 510-0426

  Opened in October 2026. Independent.

• Adam & Eve, 4327 East O Street

  10am to midnight, every day

  Lingerie, lubricants and toys.

• Doctor John's, 710 N 48th Street

  Closes 11pm · (402) 423-0031

• Wicked Smoke, 1603 W O Street

  Closes 10pm · (402) 477-0156

  A tobacco shop that carries adult stock alongside it.

Hours as the operators publish them, checked 28 October 2026. Ring before a late trip.

What 1986 actually outlawed

Lincoln has never banned this trade. On 10 March 1986 the city council passed ordinance 14335, which banned the closed door, and that is the whole of it. The police chief, Dean Leitner, spoke at the public hearing, and he knew the building: when he took over as chief he had been added as a defendant to the civil rights suit the shop filed in June 1977 over that spring’s searches. The council did not legislate about the films. It legislated about the architecture.

No person shall maintain any picture arcade unless the entire interior of such premises wherein the pictures are viewed is visible upon entrance to such premises. No partially or fully enclosed booths or partially or fully concealed booths shall be maintained.

Ordinance 15466 lifted the rule into a chapter of its own on 5 March 1990 and widened it on the way. The 1986 version reached the part of the premises where pictures were watched. The one in the code today reaches all of it.

The rewrite took the fine from one hundred dollars to five hundred, with every day counting separately, and kept the carve-out for an assembly building as defined by the building code. That carve-out is why a room with seats in it is a different thing in Lincoln law from a cabinet with a door.

No permit, no buffer, eleven districts

Three conditions govern a picture arcade in Lincoln. Everything inside, including every place a picture is watched, has to be visible to somebody standing in the doorway. Nobody under nineteen may be in there without a parent or guardian. And nobody running the place may knowingly let sex or open soliciting happen in it.

There is no licence and no permit. Chapter 5.27 refers to a permittee, and to revoking a permit provided for elsewhere in the chapter, and no section of the chapter issues one. In 1986 the rule sat inside the chapter on mechanical amusement devices, which did license: an annual permit from the city clerk, expiring every 31 May. The 1990 rewrite took the substantive sections out and left the licensing behind. What was left of it was repealed in its entirety on 24 November 2025, seven votes to nothing.

Nor is there a distance rule. Lincoln’s separation regime for adult uses, with its 1,500 foot cap between premises and its 1,000 feet from schools and parks, reaches only live performance, and an arcade has no performers in it.

A room with a coin slot is allowed as of right in more of Lincoln than a cinema is.

Two companies, one storefront, 921 O Street

The place the ordinance was written for stood at 921 O Street. Tara Enterprises ran the Adult Book & Cinema, with a coin-operated arcade behind it: twenty booths, two eight millimetre projectors in each, forty machines. Zachary Productions ran Cinema X in the same building, a minitheater with approximately thirty-six theatre-type seats and a large screen on one wall. A sign inside the door restricted admission to adults and charged a fifty cent browser’s fee.

The same block had heard Oscar Wilde. On 24 April 1882 he lectured in a hall on the north side of the 900 block of O Street.

In November 1986 it was advertising as the Cinema X Adult Theater and Video Arcade, films running continuously round the clock. Four dollars for an adult, two for a senior citizen, six for a couple, and a quarter bought about two minutes in a booth.

Two prosecutions out of 1977 produced forty-two obscenity convictions, twenty at the maximum thousand dollar fine. Then in October 1984 the county attorney filed six more counts. The county court dismissed them in January 1985, the district court reinstated them, they were refiled in May, and on 21 November 1985 the case was dismissed because the brief was never filed. On 10 March 1986 the council passed ordinance 14335.

The doors stayed on for five more years. By the time the city sued for an injunction there were thirty-three single-person booths, about three feet square, each with a full-length door that closed and locked. On 26 April 1991 the Eighth Circuit affirmed federal convictions for shipping obscene material by common carrier, with fines of $120,000 and $80,000 against the two companies behind the shop. On 14 June 1991 the Nebraska Supreme Court affirmed the injunction. One court was deciding what was in the films. The other was deciding whether the door could close.

The building burned on 12 December 2010, a Sunday. Total loss, nobody hurt, cause never determined. The site is bare ground now, beside the hotel at 905 O Street.

The Embassy, the twin, and one winter at the State

The Embassy, 1730 O Street, was purpose-built, opening on Wednesday 10 March 1971 as a mini-theater for unusual foreign and domestic films. It was running X-rated film within two years, continuously from eleven in the morning. In November 1976 two plain-clothes detectives were sitting through one showing a week to measure the films against the city’s standard, and the manager said identification was checked unless the customer was a regular. On 21 January 1988 it was still listed with two X-rated films running continuously.

Hollywood and Vine Twin Theatres was on the second floor of the Glass Menagerie, a thirteen-shop mall at 12th and Q. It opened as a twin on 22 December 1972 and ran a split bill: on 18 February 1977 the Vine had Deep Throat and the Hollywood had One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Four weeks later the Daily Nebraskan’s film column listed ten screens and neither of them was there.

The State, 1415 O Street, now the Bourbon Theatre, booked X-rated features for one winter between ordinary bookings. It was not an adult house.

Written in 1940, sentenced in 2006

The arcade rule is the one Lincoln wrote for this trade. The one it reaches for when something happens in a room is much older. Sections 9.20.030 and 9.20.040, maintaining a disorderly house and being an inmate of or visiting one, carry their lineage in small print at the foot of the section, and both trace to ordinance 3489 as amended by ordinance 3726 on 11 March 1940. The phrase “inmate of a disorderly house” reads oddly on a modern charge sheet because it is not modern. The penalty is. In April 2006 the council set minimum penalties where there had been none, and a first offence is now a fine of not less than two hundred and fifty dollars and not more than five hundred, or up to six months in the county jail, or both.

So the law written for this trade asks for nothing but an open door and an adult customer, and nobody has to apply to anybody to use it. The law not written for it is from 1940, and it is the one with a jail term in it.