Earlier this week, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette celebrated the 100th Anniversary of the movie theater (You Saw It Here First: Pittsburgh's Nickelodeon Introduced the Moving Picture Theater to the Masses in 1905). The claim isn't true, as the article notes, but the article is worth reading to get a better understanding of how a new medium is adopted by the public. There are the obvious social issues:

Social activists grew worried about children spending too much time at the movies, because of their violent and sexual themes. Some were afraid of the immigrant labor pool attracted to the silent films -- which didn't need to be in English to be understood -- and others feared the idea of women in dark rooms mixing with strange men.

Typically, the show would include a stop-action film called an "actuality," showing something like a flower growing or a building getting demolished; a film of an exotic country such as China, called a "scenic"; plus short comedies and melodramas.