Here is one instance of this happening, in France in 1950.

To show movies at home to his family he becomes a film thief, La Croix, 23 September 1950

The First Correctional Chamber of the Seine imposed a four month suspended prison sentence and a 6,000 franc fine on Raymond Vérin, 28 years old, a lorry driver with the SCNF [railway company], for having stolen film reels which he was responsible for delivering to a studio. In order to show films to his family, Vérin had bought a small movie projector. He explained, moreover, that he had never been able to make it work. The film reels were found by the police during a search and returned to the owner.

As we can see, it did not go very far. Assuming that Vérin stole 35-mm reels, he probably thought that he could just buy a projector and show his happy family the next blockbuster in his home - that would be DeMille's Samson and Dalila in 1951 - and save 500 fr per showing (assuming a ticket price of 125 fr and a family of four). Except that the kind of equipment affordable to a French lorry driver - a "cheap" 8-mm projector that would still cost him two months of salary - did not run 35-mm movies.

Which is the main issue: professional movie equipment is expensive to run or rent, and out of reach for regular people. The only way this situation could happen is that of a person rich enough to have a fully equipped theatre room hiring minions to steal reels from theatres, which would not be very profitable in addition to being risky. Now, stealing the 8-mm and 16-mm versions of popular movies that were shown in films societies (cine clubs, film clubs) is something that may have happened. Theft was not a worry when I was running a cine club in the 1980s, but we can imagine situations where stealing a 16-mm copy could be worth the trouble.

Film theft, however, was a serious problem in the first decades of cinema, but it was not to facilitate home viewing: it is just that prints were expensive items, and that there were exhibitors willing to get them as cheaply as possible. In the silent era, film distribution in the US relied on companies called "film exchanges" - exchanges for short - who bought movies from producers and rented them to exhibitors. Exchange were competitive businesses, and they treated movies as physical commodities sold and rented by the foot. They stored their large inventories in warehouses - which occasionally caught fire due to the flammable nature of nitrocellulose films - and they used carriers to send the prints as fast as possible to the exhibitors - by bicycle, car, train, and even plane.

All of this made prints valuable targets for thieves, and the many ways of stealing movies in the silent era have been listed by Alvarez (2005) (the sources cited below are his). The simplest consisted in exhibitors failing to return a print and selling it to other exchanges or theatres (Wheelan, 1908). Others subrent the films to other distributors before returning them, or even copied them.

Direct theft was common: vehicles disappeared with the reels they carried, as in the incident reported in Chicago in 1916, where a wagon containing two five-reel features and twelve shorts was stolen (McQuade, 1916):

Look Out for These Stolen Films! About one o'clock Wednesday morning, April 5, the wagon of the H. & H. branch of the Mutual Film Corporation, in front of the office at 117 North Dearborn street, this city, was robbed of films costing about $4,000. The wagon was being loaded, and the driver had gone up to the second floor of the building to get more packages when the robbery took place. When he returned to the street, the horse and wagon with the films already loaded had disappeared. The police were immediately notified, and some hours afterwards the horse and wagon were discovered about a mile away, but the films were gone. At the time the wagon was stolen, the driver was loading it for the delivery of films at several railroad depots, the shipments being intended for out-of-town exhibitors. L. A. Getzler, the wide-awake branch manager of the Mutual, arranged that these exhibitors were not deprived of their shows, as other films were shipped to them in time. Detectives are hard at work trying to trace the stolen films, and exhibitors everywhere, as well as small exchange concerns, are warned to look out for any person or persons who may try to dispose of them.

Exchange warehouses were another easy target for thieves, who were able to pilfer hundreds of reels - entire serials in the case of a Pathé exchange in 1917. Stolen reels were collected by phony exchanges - one located in Edinburg, Virginia, was seized in 1916 with 125,000 feet of stolen prints -, used by dishonest exibitors, or even by "pirate" theatres, such the makeshift one discovered in 1913 in Boston that was run by four "juveniles" (Moving Picture World, 17 November 1913). Two policemen, alerted by a theatre manager who complained about stolen reels, followed a group of shifty-looking kids exiting the establishment:

From the hall door of the theater crept and sidled the dramatic procession, the kid in the lead. On the street he straightened his figure, broke into a dead run down Eaton street for a couple of blocks and then dove sharply into an alley. Breathlessly the two officers halted at the entrance and then followed, turning from the alley into a low cellar and then halted in relief as they found themselves in the company of four boys.

"Blow me, John, if it ain't a theayter!" exclaimed Carnes as he collared two of the boys while Sergeant Anderson surrounded the other two.

An investigation of the Juvenile theater disclosed 23 moving picture reels that had been showing at the theater around the corner in a two-hour show, while the young Wallingfords were eating high at one cent a head and packing the auditorium at every performance. A moving picture machine of odds and ends of other machinery that was a marvel of mechanical genius was tearfully owned up to by its young inventor, one of the four proprietors while the picture reproduction on the screen proved to be almost perfect.

The four culprits were arraigned in Juvenile Court charged with the larceny of 23 reels of moving picture film valued at $2,300. Some of the reels were stolen from the film district as well as theaters.

This is the closest I could find in the silent era of movies stolen for a "home theatre". Exchanges also accused theatre owners of vandalizing movies by "clipping out scenes for personal use or to add to their own film collection" (Alvarez, 2005):

One Bronx exhibitor was said to have spliced together a 600-foot reel of 'cabaret subjects' cannibalized from other films and allegedly attempted to rent this pirated compilation to friends at a commercial rate.

Such problems led film companies - producers, exchanges, and exhibitors - to reinforce security in the weakest points of film distribution, and to tighten their mutual relations, for instance by holding exhibitors responsible for the prints, and by forcing them to use accredited carriers. In the 1920s, there were still movies being stolen, but for the international markets, in Asia (The San Francisco Examiner, 18 January 1922), or in the Balkans (The Burlington Free Press, 4 May 1925).

The situation in France was perhaps a little better - I've found only about twenty incidents in the press between 1908 and 1942 -, but movies were regularly stolen there too, to be sold to shady exhibitors in France or in other countries. Producer Léon Gaumont himself was victim of a burglary and had 10,000 fr worth of movies stolen from his home in 1908 (one of the culprits was a 16-year old Gaumont employee)(Le Radical, 20 April 1908). However, thefts typically happened in the theatres themselves, with the burglars - who in some cases were theatre employees - appropriating entire feature movies. There were also attempts at blackmail, as in April 1939, when thieves stole two movies in the basement of a Parisian theatre, and phoned the owner to demand 5,000 fr in exchange for the safe return of the movies (Le Figaro, 12 Avril 1939. Movie theft followed by blackmail is also one hypothesis advanced in 2005 to explain the murder of Italian director Pier Paolo Pasolini (Vulliamy, 2014).

So: well before VHS and digital, criminals used to steal movies from warehouses and theatres, mostly to sell them for cheap to other theatres.

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