Following two years of COVID and its Hellenic variants, travel restrictions, massive layoffs at its sponsoring publication, and a change of venue, the raucous and beloved AVN Show is set to return to Las Vegas in the first week of January, 2023.
Scheduled from January 4-7 at the Vegas outpost of Resorts World International, the Kuala Lumpur-headquartered gaming and plantation conglomerate, whatever follows “Kuala Lumpur-headquartered gaming and plantation conglomerate” can’t possibly measure up and yet I will say that the AVN Show will mark the 25th anniversary of the Adult Entertainment Expo and the 40th annual AVN Awards, rolled into one half-week of pornishness.
AVN’s last show in Vegas bowed as the pandemic brewed; the January, 2020 event, which comprised all the award presentations and expos as well as dozens of satellite gatherings for insiders and tourists alike, was the last hurrah for the former Hard Rock Hotel & Casino. AVN had already signed a multi-year deal with the Virgin Hotel & Casino that would be occupying the Hard Rock’s footprint when everything shut down, forcing the Awards and related events onto a series of digital platforms, like everything else. As late as last summer, plans were still afoot to hold the 2022 AVN Show at Virgin, but the Delta variant and the logistical carnage of the previous year intervened.
I’m not aware of who or what pulled the plug on the Virgin contract, but AVN’s press release boasts that it is getting back to its “roots” on the Strip, even though its roots were in a Philadelphia porn store but, yes, the first AVN Awards that were held in Vegas were, in fact, on the Strip, in a small hall at the Aladdin (formerly the Tallyho!), in February of 1984. Planet Hollywood and its excellent potato restaurant now stand on that hallowed spot.
We are beyond excited to welcome all our friends and colleagues in the industry and the fans of adult entertainment around the world back to the AVN Show live and in person in Las Vegas. We’re also thrilled to get back to our roots on the Las Vegas Strip and give the 2023 AVN Show an entirely new look and feel.
AVN Media Network CEO Tony Rios
Rios did not elaborate on the “entirely new look and feel,” but I hope that is a wild, porn-style exaggeration. I don’t want a porn convention to have an entirely new look and feel; I want the casino air to be redolent—as it always has come January—of bad choices that have not yet come home to roost and/or melon body spray.
In that the AVN network of publications has chosen to move away both from explicit imagery in its pages as well as from less-than-sunny reportage that treats the adult business like any other industry, perhaps [as is speculated here], Virgin, in its courting of women, may have breathed a corporate sigh of relief that AVN couldn’t return in 2021 and 2022, and perhaps cut the cord. Plus, the irony of holding a convention where only a simple majority of the attendees are virgins would be too on the nose.
Resorts World Las Vegas is just 2.2 miles north of the old Aladdin; not quite the main Strip but also not the old Strip of Fremont Street fame. It is south of the Strat and Circus Circus in an area that is filled with promise, a perfect locale to crown a Best New Starlet winner.
Previously on Porn Valley Observed: Bloodbath at the Mothership; Last Call at the Hard Rock
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