The building
From Cine Roxy to dinner show: the 1938 cinema on Copacabana
The Roxy is one of the last of Copacabana's golden-age picture palaces. Here's its story, and what the restoration kept.
See Roxy Dinner Show tickets on GetYourGuide ↗Copacabana's cinema age
In the 1930s and 40s Copacabana was Rio's glamorous new neighbourhood, and its avenue filled with grand cinemas — Art Deco palaces with names like the Roxy, the Rian and the Metro. They were where the city went out at night, and they anchored a beachfront culture of cafés, dancing and the movies that defined Rio's image abroad.
The Roxy, 1938
The Roxy opened in 1938 on Avenida Nossa Senhora de Copacabana, a block back from the beach, in the streamlined Art Deco style of the moment. For decades it was one of the neighbourhood's principal cinemas, surviving long after most of its contemporaries had closed or been converted, and becoming, by the 2010s, one of the last of the old picture houses still standing on the avenue.
The restoration
As a cinema the Roxy finally closed, and its restoration as a dinner-show venue was a major project — reported at around sixty-five million reais — that kept the landmark facade and the scale of the auditorium while rebuilding the interior around a wide stage, a dining floor and a luminous dome that reacts to the performance. It reopened as the Roxy Dinner Show and was named one of TIME's World's Greatest Places in 2025.
What you'll notice inside
The proportions are the old cinema's: a large single room with a real sense of height, now filled with tables rather than rows of seats, facing a stage where the screen once was. The dome and the LED panels are new and do a lot of the show's visual work. If you care about the history, arrive at the start of your seating and take the room in before the lights change.
Seeing it in context
The Roxy sits among Copacabana's other survivors of the era — the Copacabana Palace hotel of 1923 a few blocks away, the beachfront promenade with its wave mosaic, and the neighbourhood's remaining Deco apartment blocks. A late-afternoon walk along the avenue and the promenade before a dinner seating places the building in the Rio it was built for.