The scene at Marquee Nightclub on a recent Monday evening looked nothing like the dark days of 2020. Steve Aoki commanded a reimagined DJ booth, positioned two feet closer to the dance floor than before, while a massive 1.5-ton LED screen with a kinetic centerpiece pulsed behind him. The crowd was thick with locals, industry insiders, and tourists who had caught wind that something different was happening at the Cosmopolitan.
After years of dormancy, Marquee Mondays are back. But this is more than just a weekly party returning to the calendar. It represents a broader shift in how Las Vegas nightlife operators are thinking about their business models, their relationship with locals, and the very architecture of the club experience itself.
The Economics of Empty Mondays
For most Las Vegas nightclubs, Monday nights have always been a puzzle. Tourist traffic dips significantly as weekend visitors head home, and even the most optimistic promoter struggles to justify opening a massive venue for a sparse crowd. The math simply does not work when you factor in staffing costs, security, and the electricity bill for keeping 40,000 square feet of nightclub operational.
Marquee originally launched its Monday nights before the pandemic as a locals-focused alternative to the tourist-heavy weekends. According to Jason Strauss, co-CEO of Tao Group Hospitality, these events were once considered the most prominent night in Las Vegas for the local industry to party. Then COVID-19 shut everything down, and when venues reopened, many operators quietly decided that Mondays were not worth the effort.
The Cosmopolitan, however, saw an opportunity. While competitors were consolidating their operations into fewer nights, the resort launched “Unlock Your Mondays,” a comprehensive promotion offering locals exclusive drink deals, dining discounts, room packages, and free parking. Marquee became the anchor of this strategy, but only after investing heavily in upgrades that would make the venue feel fresh enough to justify asking people to go out on a school night.
The Technology Play
The renovation was not cosmetic window dressing. The club received a complete overhaul of its sound and lighting systems, plus that attention-grabbing monolith LED screen. But the real innovation is less visible: an in-house content creation team that produces unique visuals for every single show.
This matters because modern clubgoers, particularly younger demographics, are not just looking for a place to hear music. They want an experience that feels worthy of social media documentation. A static light show and a DJ playing tracks will not cut it anymore. The bar has been raised by venues like the Sphere and immersive art installations at AREA15, and traditional nightclubs have to adapt or risk looking outdated.
Marquee’s investment in custom content creation for each performance gives the venue a fighting chance in an increasingly competitive attention economy. When Aoki performed, the screens displayed a trippy, vibrant cartoon version of himself alongside pyrotechnic simulations. The effect was something you could not get from a Spotify playlist at home or even from most other clubs in town.
The Locals Strategy
The return of Marquee Mondays is built on a premise that would have seemed counterintuitive a decade ago: that locals are not just filler between the high-rolling tourists but a critical audience worth pursuing aggressively.
Las Vegas has always had a complicated relationship with its residents. The city’s economy runs on visitor spending, and casino operators have historically viewed locals as secondary customers who do not drop enough money to justify premium treatment. But demographics are shifting. The Las Vegas metro area has grown to over 2.3 million people, many of whom work in the hospitality and entertainment industries. These are people with disposable income and a sophisticated understanding of what constitutes a good night out.
More importantly, locals provide something that tourists cannot: consistency. A successful Monday night locals program creates a reliable revenue stream on what would otherwise be a dead night. It also builds brand loyalty. When those same locals have friends visiting from out of town on a Friday, where do you think they will take them?
The Cosmopolitan’s approach bundles the nightclub experience with broader resort amenities. Free parking alone is a significant incentive in a city where Strip parking fees have become increasingly aggressive. Add in food and beverage discounts, and you have created a value proposition that feels less like a nightclub cover charge and more like a membership benefit.
What Comes Next
The Marquee renovation is not stopping at the nightclub. Next summer, the 22,000-square-foot Marquee Dayclub will undergo a similar transformation, with revised aesthetics and a new DJ booth. Strauss has made it clear that Tao Group intends to maintain the venue’s identity as an EDM stronghold while modernizing the physical space to meet contemporary expectations.
This pattern of continuous reinvestment is becoming the norm among successful Las Vegas nightlife operators. The days when you could open a club, book some DJs, and coast on the formula for a decade are over. Consumer expectations evolve too quickly, and social media creates instant comparisons between venues. If your club starts looking tired relative to what people see online, you are in trouble.
The broader industry is watching closely. If Marquee Mondays succeeds in drawing consistent crowds and generating meaningful revenue, expect other operators to launch similar locals-focused weeknight programming. The economics of leaving venues dark multiple nights per week are simply too painful when tourist traffic remains unpredictable.
Key Insights
The Marquee renovation and Monday nights revival reveal several important trends worth noting. First, the willingness to invest eight figures in upgrading an existing successful venue shows that complacency is dangerous even when you are already winning. Second, the focus on locals as a core audience rather than an afterthought represents a fundamental shift in how operators think about their customer base. Third, technology investments are no longer optional. Clubs that cannot deliver visually spectacular, social-media-worthy experiences will struggle to compete. Finally, bundling nightclub experiences with broader resort amenities and loyalty programs may become the new standard for attracting and retaining customers.
Notes for Industry Observers
The Monday night strategy requires a level of coordination that most single-venue operators cannot achieve. The Cosmopolitan can afford to subsidize parking and offer dining discounts because they can capture that spending across multiple profit centers. An independent nightclub owner cannot easily replicate this model, which may further accelerate consolidation in the nightlife industry toward large, integrated resort operators.
Additionally, the success of this strategy depends heavily on local market dynamics. Las Vegas has a large enough resident population with sufficient disposable income to make locals nights viable. Smaller gaming markets may find that the math does not work as cleanly.
The renovation timeline and scope also deserve attention. Major nightclub overhauls typically happen during slow periods, but they carry risk. You are essentially taking a profitable venue offline or operating at reduced capacity during construction. The decision to proceed suggests that Tao Group and the Cosmopolitan saw the competitive landscape shifting fast enough that they could not wait for a perfect window.
Finally, watch how the content creation team evolves. Right now, they are producing custom visuals for each performance. If that model proves successful, we may see nightclubs investing more heavily in creative production capabilities, essentially becoming mini entertainment studios in addition to being venues. That would represent a significant expansion of what it means to operate a nightclub and would have implications for staffing, budgets, and the types of talent these companies recruit.
