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Every year it grows just a little bit clearer that box office grosses aren't telling the whole story when it comes to measuring the audience that a film has found. Studios still don't bother to share the receipts tallied from VOD and iTunes sales. Moreover, piracy—now a more troubling and more tolerated problem than ever before—accounts for an ever-increasing percentage of how a film is seen.
Variety is reporting the most-pirated titles of 2014 as well as the number of times they've been downloaded, and the totals are staggering (for a less-troubling list, check out our rundown of the 20 best films of 2014). While the obvious takeaway is that a whole bunch of people are down to watch movies for free if it's simple enough to do so, the list offers plenty of insight into the current nature of Hollywood's connection with its consumers.
In a list that's invariably packed with franchise blockbusters, it's somewhat surprising that Martin Scorsese's The Wolf of Wall Street took the No. 1 spot, registering more than 30 million downloads. That a hedonistic epic about sex, drugs and money tops a collection of movies that is otherwise dominated by superhero stuff like Captain America: The Winter Soldier and X-Men: Days of Future Past reaffirms the idea that Hollywood is run by the appetites of teenage boys who can't buy tickets to anything rated R (though if they continue to steal movies instead of paying for them, that might not be the case for much longer). Having said that, the fact that Disney's Frozen iced the No. 2 spot might suggest that a lot of parents couldn't resist a free babysitter.
The preponderance of 2013 films on the list also suggests that piracy is far more static than the weekend box office, and that popular movies are downloaded at a steady rate for months at a time rather than snatched en masse the moment they leak onto the web. Of the movies in the top five, only Robocop actually came out this year, its 29.8 million downloads suggesting that some movies explode online because so few people were willing to pay to see them in theaters. As to the 23.6 million people who grabbed Best Picture Oscar winner 12 Years a Slave…your guess is as good as mine.
Here is Variety's full list:
1. The Wolf of Wall Street: 30.035 million (Paramount, Dec. 25, 2013)
2. Frozen: 29.919 million (Disney, Nov. 27, 2013)
3. RoboCop: 29.879 million (MGM, Feb. 12, 2014; and Orion, July 17, 1987)
4. Gravity: 29.357 million (Warner Bros., Oct. 4, 2013)
5. The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug: 27.627 million (Warner Bros., Dec. 13, 2013)
6. Thor: The Dark World: 25.749 million (Disney/Marvel, Nov. 8, 2013)
7. Captain America: The Winter Soldier: 25.628 million (Disney/Marvel, April 4, 2014)
8. The Legend of Hercules: 25.137 million (Summit, Jan. 10, 2014)
9. X-Men: Days of Future Past: 24.380 million (20th Century Fox, May 23, 2014)
10. 12 Years a Slave: 23.653 million (Fox Searchlight, Oct. 18, 2013)
11. The Hunger Games: Catching Fire: 23.543 million (Lionsgate, Nov. 22, 2013)
12. American Hustle: 23.143 million (Sony/Columbia, Dec. 13, 2013)
13. 300: Rise of an Empire: 23.096 million (Warner Bros., March 7, 2014)
14. Transformers: Age of Extinction: 21.65 million (Paramount, June 27, 2014)
15. Godzilla: 20.956 million (Warner Bros., May 16, 2014)
16. Noah: 20.334 million (Paramount, March 28, 2014)
17. Divergent: 20.312 million (Lionsgate, March 21, 2014)
18. Edge of Tomorrow: 20.299 million (Warner Bros., June 6, 2014)
19. Captain Phillips: 19.817 million (Sony/Columbia, Oct. 11, 2013)
20. Lone Survivor: 19.130 million (Universal, Dec. 25, 2013)