What a year it's been for movies. Marvel continued to rock our world with the mega-successful space romp Guardians of the Galaxy. 12 Years a Slave won the Academy Award for Best Picture. And it seemed like a little movie called The Interview would threaten the world as we know it.
As much as people talked about the biggest movies of the year, they also watched them, and they didn't always do it by paying for a ticket at the theater. As you're probably aware, there are some people out there that get their film fix by not paying for movies but illegally downloading them to stream online. Unsurprisingly, the most pirated movies of 2014 were also some of the most commercially and critically successful films of the year.
Martin Scorsese's Academy Award-nominated film The Wolf of Wall Street was the most pirated movie of the year with slightly more than 30 million downloads, according to piracy-tracking firm Excipio's recently released list of the 20 most pirated films of 2014. This was followed by the uber-hit Frozen and the critical darling Gravity, each with nearly 30 million downloads.
Superhero flicks and huge action-adventure blockbusters also dominated the list with The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug, Thor: The Dark World and Captain America: The Winter Soldier rounding out the top six. However, Guardians of the Galaxy was conspicuously absent from the list. It was the highest-grossing film in the U.S. this year, grossing more than $330 million at the domestic box office, according to Box Office Mojo. Perhaps most people actually paid to see the film in movie theaters? Or maybe Guardians of the Galaxy was just released too late to be factored into this list.
The most surprising title on this list is the film at No.20, RoboCop. No, not the 2014 remake starring The Killing's Joel Kinnaman and Gary Oldman. The 1987 original starring Peter Weller in the title role somehow landed on this list. Perhaps after watching RoboCop's reboot, people were hankering for the real thing.
Here are the top 10 most pirated movies of 2014 along with the number of downloads for each title:
1. The Wolf of Wall Street: 30.035 million downloads
2. Frozen: 29.919 million downloads
3. Gravity: 29.357 million downloads
4. The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug: 27.627 million downloads
5. Thor: The Dark World: 25.749 million downloads
6. Captain America: The Winter Soldier: 25.628 million downloads
7. The Legend of Hercules: 25.137 million downloads
8. X-Men: Days of Future Past: 24.380 million downloads
9. 12 Years a Slave: 23.653 million downloads
10. The Hunger Games: Catching Fire: 23.543 million downloads
Head over to Variety to see the full list of the top 20 most pirated movies of 2014.
