The Mayan Theatre has been showing movies since 1930, which means it was selling popcorn before your grandparents were born. That alone would be enough to make it worth a visit. But the building — a pre-Columbian Revival confection on South Broadway that looks like someone strapped a Aztec temple to a neighborhood movie house — is the kind of thing that makes you stop mid-sidewalk and wonder how you’ve walked past it a dozen times without really looking.
I showed up on a Tuesday evening, which is the correct time to visit any independent theater if you dislike crowds and prefer to choose your own seat without negotiating. South Broadway was doing its usual thing: a tattoo parlor, a vintage clothing rack spilling onto the sidewalk, somebody’s dog tied to a parking meter. The Mayan sits between all of that with an improbable dignity, its terracotta facade lit warmly enough that you can actually read the marquee from across the street.
Inside, the lobby is narrow and slightly dim, decorated with murals that have been there long enough to count as historic. The carpet is not new. None of this is a complaint. There’s a specific pleasure in a movie theater that hasn’t been focus-grouped into a recliner lounge with app-based ordering — one that still has the faint smell of decades of concession butter worked into the walls. The Mayan has that. Ticket prices run around $11-$13 for standard screenings, which is already a small mercy compared to what the multiplexes are charging these days.
The theater runs three screens and leans toward art house, independent, and foreign films, with the occasional documentary that would never find its way to the AMC down the highway. The week I went, the options included a French film I’d been meaning to see since it screened at Sundance eight months prior, a limited-run American indie that had exactly the kind of distributor nobody’s heard of, and a revival screening of something from the 1970s. It’s the kind of lineup that requires you to actually read the film descriptions rather than just pick whatever has the most familiar names in the cast.
The seats are standard — not the throne-sized recliners that have colonized every other cinema in the metro — but they’re fine, and the screens are appropriately sized for the intimate rooms. The sound was clean. The audience on a Tuesday evening consisted of maybe thirty people across two screenings, which is either alarming for business or ideal for the viewer, depending on your perspective. I found it ideal.
Parking on Broadway is the usual South Broadway lottery: sometimes you find something within a block, sometimes you circle for ten minutes and end up on a side street near a taco truck. There’s no dedicated lot. Plan accordingly, or just take the light rail to the Broadway station and walk three blocks.
The Mayan is run by Landmark Theatres, which operates art house cinemas across the country — so it’s not some scrappy independent operation, but it functions like one. The programming is genuinely thoughtful, the staff knows the films they’re showing, and the building itself is a legitimate piece of Denver’s cultural architecture. If you’re the kind of person who complains that there’s nowhere in Denver to see anything that isn’t a Marvel sequel, this is the answer, and it’s been the answer since before your parents were born.
