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Fast Five the most pirated movie of 2011

Friday 30 December, 2011

By Duncan Heaney

Pirates race to download Vin Diesel vehicle online

We’re nearly at the end of 2011, but there’s still time for one more spurious list. File sharing blog Torrent Freak has revealed the ten most pirated movies of 2011.

The most-downloaded film of the year was Fast Five, a glossy action movie about beautiful cars and beautiful people ... and Vin Diesel. Figures show that the film was downloaded 9.2 million times.

That’s significantly more than the second most-pirated movie, The Hangover Part II, which was illegally downloaded 8.8 million times. The film, set in Bangkok, became the highest-grossing R-rated comedy of all time when it was released in the US in May, proving that the key to sequel success in Hollywood is to shamelessly repeat the original plot, but make it louder.

A year at the movies wouldn’t be complete without a comic book flick, and sure enough Thor emerged as the third most-pirated film of 2011. The Marvel superhero thundered to 8.3 million illegal downloads.

Fourth was thriller Source Code with 7.9 million downloads. Disappointingly, the sci-fi adventure film I Am Number Four failed to live up to its name – it was the fifth most-pirated movie of the year at 7.2 million downloads.

Stylish action film Sucker Punch was sixth (7.2 million downloads), tense survival story 127 Hours was seventh (6.9 million downloads) and animated Western Rango was the eighth most-pirated movie of the year.

Many of this year’s mega-hits were absent from the list, indicating that many people still prefer the big screen for the biggest movies. Transformers: Dark of the Moon and Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides did not make the top ten. It’s surprising - you’d expect pirates would be eager to pirate a film about pirates.

Two of the biggest movies of the year – The King’ Speech and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 did make the list, albeit at the end. The King’s Speech didn’t stutter at the box office, making £268 million, but it was stolen a relatively small number of times – 6.2 million. We did say relatively.

The final Harry Potter film was only downloaded 6 million times, but of the films on the list it was undoubtedly the biggest hit. Millions scurried to the cinema to see the increasingly hairy boy wizard finally settle the score with his nasally challenged nemesis Voldemort, to a box office of £860 million.

Image courtesy of Fuzzcat