Wiesbaden's first film screening took place on October 29, 1896 - just under a year after the first public projection of moving images in Berlin's Wintergarten variety theater by the Skladanowski brothers. Wiesbaden did not yet have its own theaters for the cinematograph either, whose premiere took place in the hall of the Plato Lodge at Friedrichstraße 27. In the following years, theater halls, restaurant side rooms and fairground stalls were used for the new medium, which initially only existed in an itinerant form. Compilations of short documentaries, slapstick interludes or so-called sound pictures were shown, in which well-known vocal arias were performed, with the sound coming from records coupled to the projector.

In addition to the traveling cinemas, which sometimes gave performances in front of several thousand spectators in converted circus tents (for example in Wiesbaden on an open space on the corner of Adolfsallee/Kaiser-Friedrich-Ring), more and more fixed cinemas were established in Germany from 1907 onwards. One of these opened in May 1907 at Rheinstraße 43 (later the Union Theater). This was followed shortly afterwards by the Auxetophon-Tonbild-Theater in Dotzheimer Straße and the Biophon-Theater in Wilhelmstraße, which had been integrated into the Hotel Monopol. By 1911, there were already five cinemas in Wiesbaden, including the Odeon-Theater (corner of Luisenstraße/Kirchgasse) and the Kinephon-Theater (later Capitol) on Kureck. Max Mack's film "The Other" was shown there in the autumn of 1913, an early example of developing European cinematic art and one of the first full-length films that gradually replaced the compiled programs of the early cinema stopovers, which were limited to a few acts. In the same year, the Thalia Theater was built at Kirchgasse 72. With 500 seats and elegantly furnished, it was considered Wiesbaden's largest and most comfortable cinema until the end of the First World War. The conversion of the Walhalla Theater into a movie theater in 1919 brought an improvement in this respect. It offered space for 1,400 spectators and became the city's most festive premiere cinema in the following years. In 1928, shortly before the end of the silent film era, it was upgraded with a Welte film organ.

In the 1920s and 1930s, Wiesbaden gained additional movie theaters: the Ufa im Park on Wilhelmstraße in December 1926 and the Apollo on Moritzstraße in 1936. Its owner, Erich Ewert, had already opened the “Kino für jedermann” on Bleichstraße in 1927, not far from today’s Platz der Deutschen Einheit. In the late 1930s, there were fourteen movie theaters in Wiesbaden; by the end of World War II, only six remained. Afterward, the number skyrocketed: by 1950 there were 22, and by 1955 as many as 32. This corresponded to a total seating capacity of 15,500. Cinemas destroyed during the war were rebuilt—such as the Neue Filmpalast on Schwalbacher Straße with its 1,000 seats—former theaters were repurposed (the Residenz-Palast at the corner of Kirchgasse and Luisenstraße, with 1,300 seats) or new movie theaters were built, such as the Arkaden am Ring (800 seats).

In addition to established theaters, starting in 1953, specialized venues such as the Apollo began showing the first 3-D films; that same year, a newsreel theater opened on Langgasse (Aki) opened on Langgasse, screening newsreels and short films from 9:00 a.m. to midnight. As the range of offerings expanded, attendance figures rose: while there were around 2 million in 1938, ten years later the number had already reached 3.2 million. The record of 5.8 million moviegoers was set in 1956. This corresponds to an average of 23 movie theater visits per year. This placed Wiesbaden (despite having a population of only 150,000) in seventh place in the Federal Republic of Germany at the time. With the increasing spread of television in the late 1950s, Wiesbaden’s movie theaters also saw a decline in revenue. As a result, the number of movie theater visits fell by nearly a third between 1956 and 1959, from just under 5 million to 3.4 million.

The looming cinema crisis was accompanied in Wiesbaden by a decades-long wave of theater closures, to which most of the large theaters fell victim: The freestanding, neoclassical Capitol on Kureck (formerly the Kinephon Theater), which had emerged from an art salon in 1908 and had survived the destruction of World War II unscathed, had to make way in 1965 for an office high-rise, the Residenz-Palast to a department store expansion, and the Neue Filmpalast to a parking garage. Existing movie theaters (such as the Thalia and the Apollo) were subdivided by the addition of smaller auditoriums or converted into so-called “cinema centers.” With the exception of the basement cinema Bambi, the Ewert cinema chain—now in its third generation—holds a monopoly on Wiesbaden’s commercial cinemas, operating eight screens in three venues (as of 2016).

As a result of an initiative by the German Film Institute (DIF), the Caligari Archive Cinema opened in April 1980—initially only in the balcony of the former Ufa im Park—and was later taken over by Wiesbaden’s Cultural Affairs Office as a municipal cinema under the name Caligari FilmBühne. In 2009, Wiesbaden gained a new (studio) cinema with the Murnau-Filmtheater, which screens, among other things, repertory films from the rights portfolio of the Friedrich-Wilhelm-Murnau Foundation. Since 1984, “Filme im Schloss” has regularly shown selected films at Biebrich Palace.

Open-air cinemas are also very popular: Since 1998, the Bilderwerfer initiative has organized open-air film screenings for several weeks each summer at the Reisinger and Herbert parks.