Were they shot in 4k or something we just didn’t have TV’s that could see 4k back in the day?
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The short answer is film. The longer answer is while digital can have higher resolution than film, film can have a lot more resolution than 1080p.
A few things to cover. First let’s look at TVs and such which is what we think about when we say “4k”: old TVs and DVDs in the US were around 486×720 pixels (0.3 mega-pixels if you’re used to still cameras). Then we had 720p (720x1280pixels or 0.9 MP). Then we had 1080p (1080x1920pixels or about 2MP). 4k is around 2160×3840 (8.3MP). 8k which is pretty uncommon is 4320×7680 (or about 33MP).
Old movies were shot, edited, and “printed” onto film to be reprojected. Early films there was no digital at all, it was just analog all the way through. Film has tiny microscopic grains that turn color when exposed to light and developed. There really wasn’t a though of individual pixels with film but they tried to keep the resolution high enough that it could be copied multiple times and still projected on large movie screens and look good enough.
Then when VHS and later DVDs came along, they started scanning a lot of this film into formats they could put onto these home movie formats. At the time they may have scanned them at 4k or 2k or 1080p. Sometimes they’d be cheap and just scan what they need, sometimes they’d scan higher hoping to get a little better quality and have a scan they could use incase a better format came along. And if they did only scan it at lower resolution, when they decided to make a 4k blu ray re-release they may rescan and remaster the movie.
One thing to keep in mind is that the grains in the film do have a size. Cheaper film, older film, and film made to work in lower light will have larger grains. And film comes in different sizes 35mm film means the film is 35mm wide (the actual frame on the film is smaller maybe 22mmx16mm) but Imax (70mm) is much larger and 16mm film is smaller. The smaller the film, the more they need to magnify the image when scanning at high resolutions. The larger the grain and the larger the magnification, means you’ll see the film grain and the image will look less sharp. You won’t see a lot of 8k scans of movies unless they were shot on very large iMax film because the resolution just isn’t there in the film to take advantage of it. But for 35mm film, they can definitely scan 4k and produce a better result than 1080p.
I believe Wes Anderson often shoots his movies on 16mm and they can make 4k scans of his movies, but they won’t look as tack-sharp as a 4k version of Die Hard or some major movie from the 80’s or early 90’s that was shot on film and scanned. But that graininess works for someone like Wes Anderson, but even there a 4k scan will have a little more detail (even if it’s detail of the grains of film) than 1080p scan.
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