According to BitTorrent news site TorrentFreak, the fifth entry in the Fast and the Furious franchise took the top spot on the most pirated films of 2011. Fast Five, starring Vin Diesel and Paul Walker, had over nine million downloads over the course of the year. Close behind in second and third place, The Hangover Part II and Marvel’s Thor each had over 8 million downloads each. Other films on the top ten list included Source Code, I Am Number Four, Sucker Punch, 127 Hours, Rango, The King’s Speech and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2.
Oddly enough, the films that were number two through five at the box office this year, Michael Bay’s Transformers: Dark of the Moon, Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, Kung Fu Panda 2 and The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 1, were nowhere to be found on the top ten list. Those four films brought in approximately 3.4 billion dollars worldwide at the box office during 2011.
The volume of total downloads plummeted year over year compared to the top ten list of 2010. While the 2010 list contained such popular films as Jim Cameron’s Avatar, superhero film Kick-Ass and Christopher Nolan’s Inception, the total amount of illegal downloads for the movies on the top ten list fell from approximately 92 million down to 75 million. With that approximate 20 percent drop in volume of illegal downloads, reasons for that could range from the closure of torrent sites over 2011 and lack of availability to a lower amount of interest in the theatrical releases of 2011.
This trend of lower volume of illegal downloads is also represented in the decreased number of television episodes tracked by TorrentFreak. While shows like Showtime’s Dexter and HBO’s Game of Thrones took the top spots on that list, the amount of downloads also dropped by an identical 20 percent in terms of total volume of downloads year over year.
