A list of this year’s most pirated movies has been revealed online, with most of 2014’s blockbuster releases featuring.
Director Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street, starring Leonardo DiCaprio, claimed the title of most illegally downloaded film in 2014.
According to piracy-tracking firm Excipio, Disney’s Frozen came a close second, with both movies downloaded approximately 30 million times across torrent sites between 1 January and 23 December.
Robocop was the third-placed film on the list, but its figures did include 1987’s original release alongside this year’s remake, according to The Hollywood Observer. Gravity was close behind with 29.357 million downloads.
The list of most-pirated movies includes a number of Oscar nominated films. Alongside The Wolf of Wall Street, which picked up five nominations including Best Picture, 12 Years a Slave, American Hustle and Captain Phillips were some of the other Academy Award nominees to make the list.
The highest-grossing film of 2014, The Guardians of the Galaxy did not make the top-20 most pirated films of the year, however. The Hollywood Reporter speculates that this may have been because "anyone interested in the film opted to see it in theaters".
Online piracy experienced a particularly high-profile end to 2014, with Swedish police taking down the notorious file-sharing site The Pirate Bay, albeit only temporarily. The site, which has a cloud-based infrastructure, is virtually impossible to take down permanently and has been revived by rival peer-to-peer website Isohunt.
The full list of 2014’s most pirated films can be found here.
Published under license from ITProPortal.com, a Net Communities Ltd Publication. All rights reserved.