I was a projectionist years ago and it would have been very easy to cam rip films on “print build nights.” Was always a Wednesday, we’d all come in late and built the reels into full prints for our big horizontal platter projectors. We’d all then separate off and watch the movies after the theater closed to note any defects or other issues before those movies launched that week.
If a film was DTS audio (the film had a time code and that would sync with CD audio tracks), you could have even run a sound recorder to the headphone jack on the DTS tower that handles the audio for those prints.