The Most Pirated Movies of 2013 — And Why Piracy Isn't Hurting the Box Office

Despite the high number of pirated films, Hollywood isn’t hurting. The latest numbers show that 2013′s box office is poised to be the best yet with $10.9 billion domestically, slightly edging out 2012′s $10.8 billion.
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The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey finished 2013 -- a year where it earned over $300 million domestically at the box office -- by being named the no. 1 most torrented movie of the last 12 months. The first film in* The Hobbit* movie trilogy had an estimated 8.4 million downloads via BitTorrent, according to TorrentFreak.

The Hobbit, which had already racked up 2 million downloads by this time last year, was followed by Django Unchained (8.1 million downloads) and Fast and the Furious 6 (7.9 million downloads). The full list is here. Other top torrents include Silver Linings Playbook and, surprisingly, no-so-hot-at-the-box-office films like Gangster Squad and Now You See Me. There also were, according to TorrentFreak's post on the tally, "a few notable absentees in 2013."

"The top grossing The Hunger Games: Catching Fire is missing for example, and Man of Steel didn’t make the cut either," TorrentFreak's Ernesto wrote. "Gangster Squad is perhaps the biggest surprise in this year’s list, as it grossed the least of all films, $105,200,903 worldwide."

Despite the high number of pirated films, however, Hollywood isn't hurting. The latest numbers show that 2013's box office is poised to be the best yet with $10.9 billion domestically, slightly edging out 2012's $10.8 billion. Researchers from Wellesley College and the University of Minnesota reached similar findings in a 2012 paper on the impact of film piracy, which stated that outside of international box office affected by release lags, "we do not see evidence of elevated sales displacement in US box office revenue following the adoption of BitTorrent, and we suggest that delayed legal availability of the content abroad may drive the losses to piracy."

In other words, the longer something takes to get a proper release -- in theaters or on Netflix/iTunes/DVD/Blu-ray -- the more likely it is to be pirated. This seems to be especially true for Oscar-contender films. Pirating of films like Django Unchained saw a huge boost around this time last year as screeners went out to members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Quentin Tarantino's film saw 500,000 downloads in just 24 hours after a review copy appeared online – demonstrating that, as WIRED's David Kravets pointed out, "while Hollywood studios loudly complain that pirate sites are dooming their businesses … the top flicks appearing on pirate sites often are seeded by insiders."

Many of the most-pirated films were also some of the highest grossing, which may also indicate that people are downloading movies they've already paid to see in theaters. Really, it shouldn't be surprising that movies that sold scores of tickets, like the first Hobbit flick and 2013's top domestic grosser Iron Man 3, also made BitTorrent's list -- they're simply popular across the board.

TorrentFreak's numbers, of course, only track what's on BitTorrent networks – the site says the "data is estimated by TorrentFreak based on several sources, including download statistics reported by public BitTorrent trackers" – and don't include other pirated streams or forms of downloads, so "total piracy numbers will therefore be significantly higher." The figures also only include downloads that happened from Jan. 1, 2013 to mid-December – so expect The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug to light up next year's list.