The Hooters founders are making a movie about the company they built. Here is what they bought back in Texas.

On August 28, Deadline reported that the original founders of Hooters are producing "Hooters: The Movie," a buddy comedy about two friends from Iowa who stumble into a restaurant chain. Ed Droste, one of the six Clearwater businessmen who opened the first store in 1983, co-wrote the script and is producing. Director Jon Rosenbaum says it's "mostly true." Casting is underway, and they plan to shoot in the Tampa area in November.

The founders have a second project running at the same time, and it doesn't have a casting director. On October 31, 2025, Hooters Inc., the founders' company, and franchisee Hoot Owl Restaurants closed on the purchase of Hooters of America out of Chapter 11. Between them they now own about 140 of the 198 domestic restaurants that came through the process. Hooters of America had filed in the Northern District of Texas on March 31, 2025, carrying about $376 million of debt.

Texas is where that second project can be measured. Every bar and restaurant in the state files monthly, audited beverage receipts, and we hold that record at the venue level going back 19 years. What it shows for Hooters is a decline that was well underway before the bankruptcy, and that the closures only partly explain.

What they got

In 2019, 58 Hooters sites in Texas reported $39.9 million in audited beverage revenue. In 2021, the post-reopening high, 52 sites reported $43.2 million. In 2025, 38 sites reported $20.8 million. The Texas system the founders took over sells about 52 cents of alcohol for every dollar it sold in 2019, and 48 cents against 2021.

Twenty of the 2019 sites are gone. That part is visible, and it came in two waves. Sixteen Texas Hooters stopped filing after June 2024: McAllen, Laredo, Bryan, Beaumont, Seabrook, Galveston, Baytown, Lubbock, Waco, Wichita Falls, San Angelo, the River Walk in San Antonio, Southwest Freeway in Houston, downtown Fort Worth, Lewisville and Arlington. That matches, store for store, the 16 Texas closures an NBC affiliate counted off the company's own website the weekend of June 23, 2024. The three Texas stores on the June 2025 corporate closure list, Grapevine, Houston and San Marcos, each stop filing that month too.

Every Texas Hooters filing receipts in this period sat under TW Restaurant Holder, LLC, a Hooters of America subsidiary. The Texas stores were corporate, and corporate is what closed.

Most of the drop is inside the survivors

The part you can't see from the closure lists is what happened at the stores that stayed open.

Twenty-five Texas Hooters filed receipts in every month from January 2019 through December 2025. No openings, no closings, no permit changes. Their average annual beverage revenue per site:

| Year | Per site | |---|---| | 2019 | $783,000 | | 2021 | $910,000 | | 2022 | $885,000 | | 2023 | $786,000 | | 2024 | $751,000 | | 2025 | $619,000 |

Down 30 percent from 2022 to 2025 with the same addresses and the same permits. The system-wide figure, which mixes in the stores that were closing, fell 22 percent per site-month over the same span. The survivors fell faster than the average. Whatever was wrong was not concentrated in the stores that got cut.

The mix barely moved while the volume did. Beer was 70.8 percent of that cohort's beverage revenue in 2019 and 68.0 percent in 2025. Hooters remains the most beer-dependent concept in its Texas peer group, and it isn't close: the rest of the group runs near 60 percent, and Bombshells is under 45.

Wings got cheap. It didn't help.

The one input cost that matters most to Hooters went the right way over exactly this period. USDA's national wholesale price for whole chicken wings peaked at $2.62 a pound in July 2024. By June 2026 it was $0.84, the lowest reading in the series. The 2024 average was $2.17; the 2025 average was $1.41; the first half of 2026 averaged $0.99.

So the three years in which Hooters' Texas beverage revenue per surviving store fell 30 percent were also the years in which the cost of its signature product fell by two thirds. The receipts don't measure food, and we can't see Hooters' wing margin from here. What we can see is that the cheapest wings since the pandemic did not bring the bar back.

The peer set went the other way

We track eight Texas concepts in the segment Hooters created. In 2019, Hooters was 25.9 percent of that group's audited beverage revenue. In 2025 it was 10.5 percent.

Ojos Locos, the Dallas sports cantina that Twin Peaks co-founder Randy DeWitt and partners started in 2010, went from 10 Texas sites and $27.5 million in 2019 to 25 sites and $73.7 million in 2025. It now holds 37 percent of the group. Twin Peaks, founded in Lewisville in 2005 as a direct answer to Hooters, grew from 23 sites and $50.4 million to 30 sites and $77.6 million, even as its parent went through Chapter 11 with FAT Brands this year; bondholders took the chain in a $359.5 million credit bid in June, and a group of franchisees is now running it. Bombshells, the Houston concept owned by RCI Hospitality, peaked at $35.1 million in 2022 and reported $19.0 million in 2025; RCI's fiscal 2025 report put most of its own sales decline on the divestiture and closure of five underperforming locations.

Per store is the number that matters for anyone valuing the Texas system. Over the twelve months ending June 2026, the average Texas Hooters produced $49,600 a month in beverage revenue. The average Twin Peaks produced $197,300. The average Ojos Locos produced $291,900. The average Bombshells produced $126,400. A Hooters in Texas today sells roughly a quarter of the alcohol of a Twin Peaks and a sixth of an Ojos Locos, from a format that leans harder on beer than any of them.

The new owners are already on the permits

The Texas record also shows the handover. In December 2025, five weeks after the deal closed, 17 permits began filing under new single-purpose entities named "Hooters of [City] 2025 LLC," one per store. By March 2026 there were 29 of them, and TW Restaurant Holder was down to a handful of stragglers.

That is the Texas footprint the founders will be operating while their movie is in production: 31 stores filing in March 2026, $1.55 million in audited beverage revenue that month, against $2.89 million on 50 stores in January 2024.

The film ends in Clearwater in 1983. The receipts pick up from there.

Data note: Audited Texas beverage receipts, venue-month grain, January 2019 through March 2026, on our venue identity graph. A site is brand, ZIP and house number, so a permit transfer does not read as a closure. Same-store cohort n=25 (all 12 months filed in each of 2019 through 2025). Peer set: Hooters, Twin Peaks, Ojos Locos, Bombshells, Tilted Kilt, Bone Daddy's, Coyote Ugly, Redneck Heaven. Trailing-twelve per-site figures: Hooters n=32 sites, 345 site-months; Twin Peaks n=28, 372; Ojos Locos n=20, 238; Bombshells n=15, 158. Receipts are on-premise alcohol only and are not comparable to total-revenue figures in court filings. Wing prices: USDA AMS Monthly National Chicken Report, whole wings, national weighted average, August 2022 to June 2026. Corporate facts: Deadline (August 28, 2026); Hooters Inc. press release (November 3, 2025); Kroll case docket 25-80078; RCI Hospitality FY2025 Form 10-K; Restaurant Business (June 15, 2026).