Yeah, TV broadcasts/VHS were by far the weakest link in the 80s and 90s. A good film from the 90s could easily capture more details than you could see in a 720p video, however, the only chance you'd have to see it would be in the cinema, and that's also assuming your cinema got a high-tier copy, cause analogue film duplication isn't perfect and some image quality is lost every time. Smaller cinemas would get copies of copies of copies, while big cinemas would perhaps get a copy that was done directly from the master.
Smaller cinemas benefited greatly from the change to digital projectors, as they could now get the exact same image quality no matter how insignificant they were.