'Wolf of Wall Street,' 'Thrones' Top Pirated Content in 2014

3 Jan, 2015 By: Erik Gruenwedel

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Perhaps it’s fitting that a movie about the largess of personal greed on Wall Street should be the most-pirated movie in 2014.

Martin Scorsese’s theatrical screed The Wolf of Wall Street, with Leonardo DiCaprio, was illegally downloaded more than 30 million times, according to piracy-tracking firm Excipio and reported by Variety.

The Paramount Pictures release narrowly edged out Walt Disney Studio’s Frozen and Fox’s RoboCop at 29.9 million downloads each, respectively.

The remaining Top 10 pirated movies included Warner's Gravity (29.4 million) and The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug (27.6 million); Marvel’s Thor: The Dark World (25.7 million) and Captain America: The Winter Soldier (25.6 million); Lionsgate’s The Legend of Hercules (25.1 million); and Fox’s X-Men: Days of Future Past (24.4 million) and 12 Years a Slave (23.7 million).

Notably, Sony’s infamous buddy comedy The Interview was illegally downloaded more than 900,000 times during its Christmas Eve digital launch.

Meanwhile, HBO’s perennial pirate favorite TV show “Game of Thrones” again ranked atop the list for the third year in a row with 8.1 million illegal downloads, according to BitTorrent.

Runner up was AMC Networks’ “The Walking Dead” with 4.8 million illegal downloads, followed by CBS’s “The Big Bang Theory” (3.9 million) and “How I Met Your Mother” (3.5 million). Other pirated favorites included Fox TV’s new Batman prequel series “Gotham” (3.2 million); The CW’s “Arrow” (2.9 million); ABC’s “Grey’s Anatomy (2.8 million); History Channel’s “Vikings” (2.7 million); USA Networks’ “Suits” (2.5 million); and Comedy Central’s “South Park,” with 2.4 million illegal downloads.

With HBO launching a standalone subscription streaming service this year, it remains to be seen how that affects “Thrones” piracy going forward. To date, HBO has only licensed select catalog programming to Amazon Prime Instant Video.

“Big Bang Theory” and “HIMYM” are available on CBS’s nascent subscription streaming service CBS All Access, while “Walking Dead,” “Gotham” and “Arrow” are aligned with Netflix.

“Vikings,” “Suits” and “South Park” are available on Hulu Plus.

The aforementioned movies and TV shows are all avaialble on disc for sale and rental.

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