First Hobbit Movie Was The Most Pirated Film Of 2013
While one might assume that the most popular movies are automatically the films that pirates would flock to download for free, the latest list of most-pirated flicks has some surprising results.
It may not be too shocking to see that The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey — the first in Peter Jackson’s three-part cash-grab expansion of the not-terribly-lengthy Tolkien book — tops TorrentFreak’s list. The film, released toward the end of 2012, did manage to gross more than $1 billion internationally in theaters.
What is more surprising is the showing of Iron Man 3 — the highest grossing movie of 2013, with more than $1.2 billion in global box office receipts — in fourth place. That puts the Robert Downey Jr. superhero flick behind Tarantino’s Django Unchained and Fast and the Furious 6, neither of which came close to raking in the cash of the third Iron Man movie.
One could argue that The Hobbit and Django received more downloads than these others because they were released several months earlier, giving pirates more opportunities to download them.
Both Fast & Furious 6 and Iron Man 3 were released in May, and yet the speedy-car movie outpaced the fantasy folks by an estimated 300,000 downloads, according to TorrentFreak.
Other surprises include Silver Linings Playbook being the fifth most pirated title of the year, as it was only the 34th most popular movie at the box office. Similarly, Gangster Squad was the 54th highest grossing movie released in 2013, but seventh on the most-pirated list.
Meanwhile, huge 2013 hits like Despicable Me 2 ($918 million worldwide gross) and Hunger Games: Catching Fire ($795 million) didn’t even make the top 10 list for TorrentFreak. Granted, the second Hunger Games movie just came out in November, but the Despicable Me sequel was released stateside in July. Guess pirates don’t care about scoring illegally shared films for kids.
You can see the whole list at TorrentFreak.com
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