The Colosseum opened as a cinema on 12 September 1924 inside a former tram depot built around 1892–1894 for the Große Berliner Pferde-Eisenbahn. It ran as a single 1,000-seat hall, closed and reopened through the postwar decades, expanded to ten screens from 1997, then closed in 2020 before reopening with three screens in September 2023.
The whole complex is a protected historic monument. Its current three-screen relaunch is run under the same management as two other Berlin premiere cinemas, with elevated mainstream and special-interest programming. The building's near-century of cinema history and its 2020 rescue campaign make it a genuine Prenzlauer Berg landmark.