‘Fast Five’ tops this year’s list of most-pirated movies
“Fast Five,” “The Hangover Part II” and “Thor” were the year’s most pirated movies, topping a list that contained some surprising differences from the most popular movies at the box office.
The fifth and most successful installment in Universal Pictures’ high-octane “The Fast and the Furious” action series, starring Vin Diesel and Paul Walker, was downloaded 9.3 million times worldwide in 2011 through BitTorrent Inc.’s file-sharing technology. The data was compiled by the BitTorrent-focused website TorrentFreak.
The top-10 list for the year included several movies that did little business at the box office but were particularly popular among tech-savvy young males, including the Jake Gyllenhaal science fiction film “Source Code” and the Zach Snyder-directed “Sucker Punch.” An unexpected No. 7 was the James Franco drama “127 Hours,” which came out in late 2010 but gained more attention early this year because of its multiple Oscar nominations.
The year’s most popular movie at the box office, “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows — Part 2,” barely sneaked onto the most pirated movie list at No. 10, having been illegally downloaded 6 million times. The films that were No. 2 and No. 3 at the box office, “Transformers: Dark of the Moon” and “The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn — Part 1,” didn’t make the top 10 list of pirated titles.
In good news for the Hollywood studios that have been waging a war on piracy — through technological means and by lobbying for anti-piracy legislation in Washington — the average number of downloads among films in the top 10 fell. Last year’s most pirated movie, “Avatar,” for instance, was downloaded 16.6 million times, 78% more than “Fast Five.”
The decrease could be explained by the growing prevalence of legal ways to watch movies online, such as Netflix streaming, or by alternatives to BitTorrent for online piracy, such as sites that allow users to illegally stream video without downloading files. Or it could simply be a result of the lower popularity of this year’s releases, as evidenced by the 4% decline in box-office receipts so far this year.
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