Adult Movie Theatres in Louisville

What is open right now

Campus Video, also listed as Arcade Adult Book Store, 2822 Seventh Street Road, (502) 637-8388, was trading in July 2026. It had a theatre and booths when its back room was last described, in April 2021. Checked 1 November 2026.

Fifty years against one building

Theatair X stood on Highway 31 East in Clarksville, Indiana, across the Ohio from Louisville. It opened in 1947 as the Theatair Drive-In and later ran as a twin. By 1966 the projectors had been shut down for a dance patio, and in 1969 it was a flea market. Late in 1970 the films came back, and on 20 November 1970 the screen showed its first X-rated feature, Sex of the Angels. The first advertisement under the name Theatair X ran in May 1971, and a local group calling itself Citizens for Decency formed against it. In its last decades it ran indoors, as an adult theatre and arcade.

In May 1973 police seized the films after a packed screening of Deep Throat. The county prosecutor spent years trying to shut the place, and by 1978 the effort had slowed: nobody could say clearly who owned it, and the higher courts had narrowed what could be prosecuted as obscene. The theatre ran for another forty years.

The town suspended its adult business licence in late 2018, and in early 2019 the council voted unanimously to revoke it. The courts upheld the town, and the cinema closed at the end of August 2021. A new operator leased the building, went to federal court, and got a temporary order.

The federal suit was dismissed in January 2023, in favour of the state courts. In December 2024 the Indiana Supreme Court upheld a $30,000 sanction against the old owners in the town’s case against them. In March 2026 the town council announced a $6 million settlement from the litigation and put it into short-term investments. Seventy-nine years after the drive-in opened, the fight over it ended with six million dollars in the town’s accounts.

The rules Louisville defended in court

The City of Louisville passed its first ordinance licensing adult businesses in 1977. On 13 February 1978 the federal court for western Kentucky upheld it, declaring it “constitutional as written and applied”. In 1986 a federal judge blocked parts of it, and the Board of Aldermen amended those parts.

Jefferson County adopted an ordinance of its own on 22 September 1987. In November 2002 that ordinance was challenged in federal court. Before the court’s evidentiary hearing that December, the county cut the distances it required between an adult business and schools, churches, parks, residential areas and other adult businesses from 1,000 feet to 500.

The city and the county merged on 16 January 2003, and the county’s ordinance came to cover the old city as well. That March the federal court blocked the whole chapter over the way it handled licences. Metro rewrote its licensing, the court narrowed its order that July to the licensing rules alone, and the Sixth Circuit agreed in August 2006.

The Metro Council passed the present ordinance on 1 March 2004. Four days later a group of adult businesses and clubs challenged it in Jefferson Circuit Court under the Kentucky Constitution. The circuit court ruled for Metro on nearly all of it, and in October 2007 the Kentucky Court of Appeals upheld every provision challenged.

On 22 April 2010 the Supreme Court of Kentucky upheld the ordinance with one exception. It struck down the rule against touching, because as written it also barred a handshake.

The Shelmar and the Downs

The Shelmar at 736 East Market Street reopened as an adult cinema on 1 January 1965, and by one account closed as one on 3 March 1983.

Boxoffice reported a new 600-seat Downs on Taylor Boulevard in 1940. It reopened as the Purple X Cinema, an adult house, on 12 May 1972, and as the Cinema Art on 9 March 1973.