‘Star Trek’ Is Most Pirated Movie of 2009

J.J. Abram’s 2009 “Star Trek” has been named by critics one of the best movies of the year, along with the most successful reboot of a longstanding franchise that enjoys the support of millions of fans around the world. According to numbers released by Torrent Freak just recently, “Star Trek” was also a favorite with the audiences in terms of illegal downloads.

With a worldwide gross of over $385 million, “Star Trek” was downloaded illegally over 10 million times (10,960,000, to be more precise), being closely followed by yet another major action movie that turned out to be a box office hit, though less of a critical success, “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen.” The top 10 chart also includes a few surprises, like “Knowing” (6,930,000 downloads) and “State of Play” (7,440,000 downloads).

“The uncontested winner on BitTorrent this year is Star Trek, with well over 10 million downloads, many more than ‘The Dark Knight’ got last year. The download statistics clearly show that BitTorrent use is still on the up, even though the relative increase is not as pronounced as in previous years. As we look over the rest of the top 10, we see that there are quite a few differences between popularity at the box office and on BitTorrent. ‘Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs’ and ‘2012’ are ranked 2nd and 4th based on their worldwide grosses but didn’t make it into the top 10 list of most swapped movies,” the aforementioned publication says.

The same goes for films that have made the top 10, but did not actually write history at the box office. “On the contrary, ‘RocknRolla’ is the third most pirated movie on BitTorrent this year, but with a minuscule worldwide revenue of $25 million it was ranked just 168th at the box office in 2008 when the movie came out. Part of the success of ‘RocknRolla’ is that it was released by the infamous uploader aXXo whose releases are always guaranteed to have at least a few million downloads,” Torrent Freak adds.

“The Hangover,” “Twilight,” “District 9” and “X-Men Origins: Wolverine” have also proved to be favorites this year with illegal downloaders. “Wolverine,” for instance, was downloaded 7,200,000, with this number being partly explainable by the fact that it leaked a long time before the official release, when post-production work on it was not even done.