James R | On 09, Jan 2014

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey was the most pirated movie in 2013, according to TorrentFreak.

The first part of Peter Jackson’s trilogy racked up over 8 million downloads on the BitTorrent network last year, ahead of Django Unchained and Fast & Furious 6.

The figures confirm the usual trend of big box office hitters being the most popular for illegal downloads. It is surprising, then, that The Hunger Games: Catching Fire and Man of Steel are both missing from the list – and, on the other hand, that the relatively floppy Gangster Squad (grossing a smaller $105,200,903 worldwide)  came in seventh in the top 10.

The otherwise high-grossing chart appears to back up research cited by TorrentFreak that piracy doesn’t damage US box office takings. Indeed, America’s theatrical box office reportedly hit a total of $11 billion in 2013, its best year in history. 

Instead, TorrentFreaks argues, the damage is done at the home entertainment end of the market. While some may feel that a pricey cinema ticket is enough to justify a free download at a later date, more common is the frustration at delayed release dates. UK DVD releases of movies are usually far behind the DVD releases in America – and with audiences becoming increasingly globalised thanks to the Internet and social media, the gap between release windows has never felt wider. 

Although it’s on the small screen, the classic example remains Game of Thrones. Season 3 is released once again on DVD and Blu-ray almost one year after its original television broadcast, causing it to regularly appear in most-pirated show rankings. With studios starting to release home entertainment titles online several weeks before disc as standard, and smaller distributors such as Artificial Eye releasing their slate simultaneously in cinemas and on- demand, it will be interesting to see how (or if) the charts change for 2014. And with Netflix using piracy as an indicator of what to acquire for their catalogue, whether any of these top 10 appear on the Internet TV service soon. Indeed, The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey is already available to stream…

Here are the top 10 most pirated films of 2013:

1. The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey
2. Django Unchained
3. Fast & Furious 6
4. Iron Man 3
5. Silver Linings Playbook
6. Star Trek Into Darkness
7. Gangster Squad
8. Now You See Me
9. The Hangover Part III
10. World War Z

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