‘Deadpool’ Is the Most Pirated Movie of 2016
When is a superhero movie like Game of Thrones? When it’s the most pirated movie of the year, of course. On a new list of all the movies downloaded from popular torrenting site BitTorrent, the merc with a mouth tops the chart over Batman v. Superman, Captain America: Civil War, and The Force Awakens.
According to data compiled by TorrentFreak, Ryan Reynolds’ Deadpool weighs in at number one on a chart of all the most illegally downloaded movies of the year — probably something the actual Deadpool would find hilarious. Sure, he’s a superhero, but he also has a sense of humor. The other superhero movies on the list are Batman v. Superman, Civil War, X-Men: Apocalypse, and Suicide Squad. Oddly, two 2015 releases, The Force Awakens and The Revenant, made the list, probably because they both came out in theaters in December, so the torrenting wouldn’t kick in until months into the new year. Warcraft and Finding Dory are #6 and #9 on the list, respectively.
These numbers don’t necessarily correlate with the top box office grossers of 2016 — The Hollywood Reporter mentions that family movies like The Jungle Book and The Secret Life of Pets, despite being among the top ten highest-grossing films of the year, didn’t even make TorrentFreak’s chart. It’s odd, but not that odd: those movies are for children whose parents took them to the theater. The people who torrent movies are, like, college kids. Deadpool would probably resonate more with the stoned and stressed masses of 19-23-year-olds.