Well beyond a year after it hit theaters and stupefied the eyeballs of every moviegoer on the planet, James Cameron's Avatar continues setting records-- but probably not the kind Fox is hoping for. According to Torrent Freak, Avatar was the most-downloaded movie of the last year, in addition to being the most-downloaded Blu-Ray of all time. And if you're still holding on to that supposed rivalry between exes Cameron andKathryn Bigelow, check this out-- making the list at #9 was Bigelow's Best Picture winner The Hurt Locker, with 6.8 million downloads to Avatar's 16.5 million.
Torrent Freak has the full list, including number of downloads next to each movie's total worldwide grosses. It's an interesting mix of huge blockbusters that everybody saw in theaters anyway-- Inception, Sherlock Holmes, Iron Man 2-- and underperforming genre movies like Kick-Ass and Green Zone, which probably would have benefited from some of these downloaders actually shelling out for a ticket. It's hard to honestly argue that downloading has severely damaged Inception or Avatar, but it's a bummer to see something worthy like Kick-Ass deemed a failure when the group that could have been its target audience-- the kind of people likely to download anyway-- chose to just steal it instead.
