Whether it’s the music business or the movie business, piracy has always been a fact of life in both, and one that leaves the major studios shuddering with fear. If a Napster style crisis ever hits Hollywood, it could end up destroying the business, much like it decimated the record industry.
It’s one thing stealing TV shows, but major movies is a whole other shebang. There’s obviously places people can download first run movies, I don’t know where, nor would I spread that information, but there’s plenty of people watching pirated films, and the top stolen flicks of the year shouldn’t be any surprise to genre fans.
Number one on the list, big shocker, is The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey. This report came in from The Huffington Post and Torrent Freak, who calculate the most stolen movies and TV shows every year. Journey was downloaded a reported 8.4 million times. #2 was Django Unchained (8.1 million), followed by Fast & Furious 6 (7.9 million), Iron Man 3 (7.6 million), Silver Linings Playbook (7.5 million), Star Trek Into Darkness (7.4 million), Gangster Squad (7.2 million), Now You See Me (7 million), The Hangover Part III (6.9 million), and World War Z (6.7 million).
Oddly enough, The Hunger Games: Catching Fire didn’t make the top ten this year, and last year the most downloaded movie was the teen found footage comedy Project X. We certainly wouldn’t be surprised to see The Desolation of Smaug top the most illegally downloaded movies list next year as well, and Game of Thrones and Walking Dead topping the list of most pirated TV shows either.
