For Curiosity's Sake, Check Out the Ten Most Pirated Movies of 2011

Monday, 02 January 2012 12:30 Written by Jordan DeSaulnier

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For Curiosity's Sake, Check Out the Ten Most Pirated Movies of 2011

We're now in 2012, and the last several weeks have, as always, included a plethora of movie-related lists summing up the year. There are, of course, many a critical list, such as IAR's Top Ten of 2011, and there is also the year-end roundup of the top-ten movies at the domestic box office. But what of the online black market? Aren't we curious to see which films amassed the most illegal downloads over the course of the year we just left behind? This is not be misconstrued as an endorsement of illegal movie torrenting, as it is instead a point of curiosity, a brief look at the most popular titles in this ubiquitous practice.

According to the ranking of TorrentFreak, Fast Five partook in easily the most action on BitTorrent with roughly 9.26 million downloads. The list includes hits like The Hangover Part II, but also, interestingly enough, movies that didn't exactly light the box office on fire, like I Am Number Four and Sucker Punch. The year's biggest domestic release, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2, barely made the list, while Transformers: Dark of the Moon and Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides are nowhere to be found.

Fast Five - 9.26 million
The Hangover Part II - 8.84 million
Thor - 8.33 million
Source Code - 7.91 million
I Am Number Four - 7.67 million
Sucker Punch - 7.2 million
127 Hours - 6.91 million
Rango - 6.48 million
The King's Speech - 6.25 million
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 - 6.03 million

In 2010, James Cameron's Avatar was torrented a whopping 16 million times, and the disparity between that figure and Fast Five's number reflects a downward trend in numbers for the most torrented movies in 2011. On average, all were lower than their predecessors, which would indicate a cause for celebration from studios, but this apparent trend could simply be due to increasingly-prevalent but still illegal alternatives to torrenting. Or it could simply be that torrents were more spread out over a greater number of titles.