Would that be like on a tripod in the audience area recording the screen?

yes.

Seems lossy somehow

it is! but that’s where Shannon sampling theorem comes in. The sampling only needs to be twice as good as the source, and then you can reconstruct the source perfectly. (with some assumptions, e.g. correct color gamut, focal point, etc.).

if you have a good camera (2x number of pixels, and 2x colordepth than the movie), then you could make a camrip with perfect quality (assuming some calibration frames, and a cinema that gives no fuck). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nyquist–Shannon_sampling_theorem

though I guess that’s still too much effort for most, and most early leaks are digital copies, as the other comments suggest.

edit: newer comments suggest camrip with a bad camera

Here are the steps:

• The attacker creates a standard Git repository.
• They commit a single symbolic link pointing to a sensitive target.
• Using the PutContents API, they write data to the symlink. The system follows the link and overwrites the target file outside the repository.
• By overwriting .git/config (specifically the sshCommand), the attacker can force the system to execute arbitrary commands–

amazing.