Ever wondered which movies were the most bootlegged of them all this year? Interestingly, it's a film starring Matthew McConaughey.
Excipio tallied up its figures, which were based on BitTorrent downloads, and found that "Interstellar" was the most pirated flick in 2015, Mashable noted.
The science fiction film "got a whopping 46.7 million downloads from the start of this year to Dec 25."
"Compared with 'The Wolf of Wall Street,' which was number one on Excipio's 2014 list with 30 million downloads, 56% more copies of 'Interstellar' were downloaded," the tech news source added.
Looks like there's been more illegal downloading activity this year as the other film in the top ten also racked up higher figures than their counterparts from 2014's list.
"In 2015, the #2 spot went to 'Furious 7' (44.7 million downloads) and #3 was 'Avengers: Age of Ultron' (41.5 million downloads)," Mashable said. "In comparison, 2014's #2 was Disney's 'Frozen' (29.9 million downloads) and #3 was 'RoboCop' (29.8 million downloads)."
Since the Excipio list didn't show stats by region, it's not known whether the rise in piracy could be down to increased activity in specific locations. However, " the overall rise in piracy flies in the face of reports from copyright advocates that say the advent of more streaming video-on-demand services helps drive piracy down."
Here's the full list as noted by Variety:
1) 46,762,310 Interstellar (2014)
2) 44,794,877 Furious 7 (2015)
3) 41,594,159 Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015)
4) 36,881,763 Jurassic World (2015)
5) 36,443,244 Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)
6) 33,953,737 American Sniper (2014)
7) 32,126,827 Fifty Shades of Grey (2015)
8) 31,574,872 The Hobbit: Battle Of The Five Armys (2014)
9) 31,001,480 Terminator: Genisys (2015)
10) 30,922,987 The Secret Service (2014)
11) 26,792,863 Focus (2015)
12) 25,883,469 San Andreas (2015)
13) 23,495,140 The Minions (2015)
14) 22,734,070 Inside Out (2015)
/FILM pointed out that the rankings, being based on total number of downloads, were favorable to movies that were released earlier during the year.
"Fall and winter releases like 'Star Wars' or 'Hunger Games' might end up with bigger numbers than some of these movies when all is said and done, but since they've only been out a short time they have fewer total downloads at this point," it said.
It's worth observing, though, that these movies on the list did very well at the box office despite being bootlegger's favorites. It can be recalled that "Furious 7" was particularly targeted by film pirates and was virtually ripped right on its release. Despite this, the action flick went on to set box office records, which were broken by other blockbusters also on this list later in the year.
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