Fanboys Anonymous

Every year, TorrentFreak takes all of the statistics from the past 12 months and compiles a list of the top 10 most pirated films and television shows downloaded through various sources from a worldwide perspective. The other day, the television list was revealed and today, the movie list has been released.

Here are the top 10 films to have been downloaded the most in 2016:


Per usual, it's no surprise to see that this list is dominated by comic book films. As I mentioned in my thoughts for the TV side of things, the types of people who torrent are typically crossing over with the audience that would watch these films to begin with. These movies also get much bigger publicity coverage and usually make the most amount of money in that year, which also begs the question: if they made hundreds of millions of dollars and shattered records, are these pirates really hurting the industry? I would have to imagine most of the people downloading these films are doing it after they've already seen the movie in theaters and they just don't want to spend another $20 to see it one or two more times. The only real surprise for me on the list is The Revenant, but that received so much Oscar buzz with Leonardo DiCaprio that I can also justify it being on the list without too much thought, nonetheless. It would have utterly shocked me if something like American Pastoral would have been downloaded more times than Suicide Squad even with all the problems the latter has.