TorrentFreak recently published its list of the most pirated movies of all time, which revealed that James Cameron’s 2009 film Avatar not only topped the charts for pirate downloads, but also in earnings at the box office.
A number of charts are available from box office revenue tracker Box Office Mojo. For this comparison, TorrentFreak opted to use the worldwide box office earnings chart.
On this chart, which disregards ticket price inflation, Avatar overtook Titanic as the top grossing movie of all time.
Box Office Mojo also has a chart where it adjusts earnings for ticket price inflation, but this is only for the US box office. It might be expected that adjusting for worldwide ticket price inflation is somewhat trickier.
According to TorrentFreak they have compiled weekly and yearly lists of the most popular movies on BitTorrent, and the aforementioned chart is based on statistics gathered from public BitTorrent trackers dating back to early 2006.
| rank | movie | ±downloads | worldwide grosses |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Avatar (2009) | 21 million | $2,782,275,172 |
| 2 | The Dark Knight (2008) | 19 million | $1,001,921,825 |
| 3 | Transformers (2007) | 19 million | $709,709,780 |
| 4 | Inception (2010) | 18 million | $825,408,570 |
| 5 | The Hangover (2009) | 17 million | $467,483,912 |
| 6 | Star Trek (2008) | 16 million | $385,680,446 |
| 7 | Kick-Ass (2010) | 15 million | $96,188,903 |
| 8 | The Departed (2006) | 14 million | $289,847,354 |
| 9 | The Incredible Hulk (2008) | 14 million | $263,427,551 |
| 10 | Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End (2007) | 14 million | $963,420,425 |
The result of the comparison isn’t really surprising if you regard box office revenues as an indication of a film’s popularity.
Add in the fact that the BitTorrent protocol became popular around mid-2004, and that TorrentFreak’s stats date back to 2006, one can easily argue for the absence of films such as Titanic and The Lord of the Rings.
However, one interesting anomaly on the TorrentFreak chart is that no recent Harry Potter film places despite many of them out-earning Transformers and Inception.
One can only hope that this, compounded with the absence of the Lord of the Rings movies, indicates that movie pirates prefer the books to the movies.
Article courtesy of MyBroadband – Top 10 most pirated movies ever
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