Although the Academy Awards may have awarded “The Hurt Locker” as the Best Picture of the year, according to Internet movie pirates, the award goes to “District 9” with James Cameron’s “Avatar” losing and coming in second yet again.
TorrentFreak has compiled a list of the Best Picture nominees, in order of downloads. If each download is assumed to be a vote, “District 9” comes out as the big cheese with over a million “votes” ahead of “Avatar.” This of course, doesn’t take into consideration that most probably saw “Avatar” in 3D.
“The Hurt Locker” comes in third with the two least popular films being “The Blind Side” with 1,845,000 “votes” and “An Education” with just 683,000 “votes.”
As TorrentFreak points out, however, some of these movies have been available online for more than a year, while others only have only been leaked to the web for a short period. “Avatar, which is second in the list with 11,326,000 downloads, became available in DVD-quality a month ago, while District 9 was already widely available last September.”
According to TorrentFreak, the data for their list was collected from several sources, including reports from all the large BitTorrent trackers. BitTorrent, for those who don’t know, is a popular peer-to-peer (P2P) filesharing protocol that has both its illicit and legitimate uses. With pirating movies not being one of them.
Overall, it’s an interesting poll nonetheless.
1. District 9 – 12,639,000
2. Avatar – 11,326,000
3. The Hurt Locker – 7,930,000
4. Up – 5,437,000
5. Inglourious Basterds – 5,376,000
6. Precious – 4,922,000
7. Up In The Air – 4,855,000
8. A Serious Man – 3,836,000
9. The Blind Side – 1,845,000
10. An Education – 683,000