"Empire" premiered on Saturday, March 6, 1965 at the City Hall Cinema, 170 Nassau Street, in Manhattan, the site of Mekas's "Film-Makers' Cinematheque" at the time. Reporting on the premiere in his "Village Voice" column, Mekas did not state how many people were in the 576-seat theater, but claimed that after the film had been running for ten minutes, 30 or 40 people surrounded him and another staff member demanding their money back, "threatening to solve the question of the new vision and the new cinema by breaking chairs on our heads".