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As far as I know, movie theaters do not compress video. Its seems like they have a digital surrogate for movie reals

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Cinema_Package

That's true; with a cap of 250 Mbps for the DCP stream, and a 4K frame size of 4096 × 2160, that's ~28 bits per pixel (if the soundtrack is disregarded). There might be a small amount of subsampling or run length encoding going on, but it's entirely plausible to distribute and play an uncompressed film on a professional projector.

EDIT: Forgot to factor frame rate into the math. Divide that by 24 frames per second. That got me curious, so I looked into it and found they're using JPEG 2000 on each frame with no inter-frame deltas. Essentially like a constant stream of I-frames.

From that link, it looks like they do compress and use JPEG2000 for it, with a max bit-rate of 250 mbit/s. IIRC 4k blu rays don't do more than 100 mbit/s, so that's quite a bit better.

4K uses h265 though, so I’d bet it achieves quite a bit better quality per bit.

Good point, and personally I've never seen compression artifacts on well-produced blu rays.

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