With only slightly more than $89 million in box-office on a reported $82 million budget, Zack Snyder’s “Sucker Punch” became one of the more notorious flops of 2011 following its March release – though those numbers certainly would have been more impressive (however negligibly) had it not been illegally downloaded more than seven million times this year.
Indeed, the green screen-heavy action film came in at #6 on TorrentFreak’s annual list of the ten most-pirated movies of the year as ranked by number of BitTorrent downloads – a list topped in 2011 by the action/heist blockbuster “Fast Five”, which burned rubber to the #1 spot with over 9.2 million illegal downloads. Of course, given the latter film’s worldwide gross of more than $620 million, being a prime target of piraters clearly didn’t make too much of a dent in its bottom line.
The only film on the list to gross less in its theatrical haul than “Sucker Punch” was Danny Boyle’s 2010 drama “127 Hours” starring James Franco, a surprise entry which grossed a little over $60 million globally but also had the benefit of a fairly modest $18 million budget.
As far as distributors are concerned, Warner Bros. had the most titles on the list with three (“Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 2”, “The Hangover Part II” and “Sucker Punch”), while Paramount had two (“Rango” and “Thor”). Genre-wise, action films make up the majority of the titles, while only two comedies – “The Hangover Part II” and the animated “Rango” – and two dramas – “The King’s Speech” and “127 Hours” – rank in the top ten.
One further observation is that the list boasts a grand total of zero female-oriented movies – an absence that certainly seems to say something about the gender breakdown of online piraters out there.
You can check out the full list below:
1 Fast Five 9,260,000 downloads $626,137,675
2 The Hangover Part II 8,840,000 $581,464,305
3 Thor 8,330,000 $449,326,618
4 Source Code 7,910,000 $123,278,618
5 I Am Number Four 7,670,000 $144,500,437
6 Sucker Punch 7,200,000 $89,792,502
7 127 Hours 6,910,000 $60,738,797
8 Rango 6,480,000 $245,155,348
9 The King”s Speech 6,250,000 $414,211,549
10 Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 6,030,000 $1,328,111,219
Any films you’re surprised didn’t make the cut?