Matthew Vaughn’s X-Men: First Class might be lagging well behind the blockbuster “R” rated comedy The Hangover Part II at the domestic box office, but when it comes to being pirated, the mutant reboot has it all over the return of the Wolf Pack.  X-Men: First Class bolted to the top of the list of most pirated films compiled weekly by TorrentFreak.  It replaced The Hangover Part II, which fell to 6th on the chart.

 

The top 10 chart of most pirated movies is quite interesting because it doesn’t necessarily coincide with the most popular movies either in the theaters or recently released on DVD.  The list includes comedies like Hall Pass (#4) and Just Go With It (#5) that didn’t exactly set the world on fire at the box office or in theaters, along with quirky action films like Priest (#8), and I Am Number Four (#10), the fanboy-targeted road comedy Paul (#9), the supernatural drama The Adjustment Bureau (#7), and the Liam Neeson action thriller Unknown (at #2).  Of the ten films only X-Men: First Class (#1), Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides (#3), and The Hangover Part II (#6) could be considered box office hits.

 

Incidentally those three movies are the only ones where the torrents are not sourced from a DVD (the Priest torrent is based on a Region 5 disc).  The three box office hits are available in “telesync” versions, which are bootlegs recorded in a movie theater.  These versions can vary wildly in quality with some shot with a professional high def camera mounted on a tripod and directly connected to a sound source provided for the hearing impaired, while others are recorded by hand with ambient noise pollution.  But even the best of “telesyncs” are well below DVD quality, so not only are the creators being ripped off, their work is been seen in a degraded form.