The 10 Most Pirated Movies

TorrentFreak's most pirated movies list is an excellent gauge of popular movies, as well as the Hollywood zeitgeist. Strong women with guns are the new favorites in the list this week, including Jessica Chastain as Ava and Megan Fox in Rogue. They're joined by the sensitive gorilla Ivan in The One and Only Ivan, while super-powers-via-drugs action from Project Power remains the most downloaded film.

Joker

Joker is still on this list, and now that Joaquin Phoenix won Best Actor for it, it may never leave.

Terminator: Dark Fate

Terminator: Dark Fate brought back James Cameron and the original Sarah Connor herself, Linda Hamilton, plus threw in some cool new Terminators and tech to go up against grandpa T-800 Arnold Schwarzenegger. It probably sounded like a recipe for instant box-office success but Terminator fatigue is real, and the film didn't even break even. That won't stop BitTorrent users from making it a "success."

Jojo Rabbit

This film proves that not only can a comedy about the Nazis work, it can be poignant and amazing. The new winner of the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay is directed by Taika Waititi, famed for making Thor: Ragnarok funny, too.

Jumanji: The Next Level

There is always a next level to Jumanji. The franchise is a constant stampede. This time Danny DeVito, Awkwafina, and Danny Glover are along for the ride.

Parasite

The well-deserving Oscar winner is still in theaters but also being illegally downloaded. However people are watching, there's finally justice for subtitles.

Ford v Ferrari

Called Le Mans '66 in some places, this isn't literally about Henry Ford beating up Enzo Ferrari; it's about the Ford company sending a team (featuring Batman and Jason Bourne) to build a car and compete against the Italian automaker's Scuderia Ferrari team.

21 Bridges

Produced by the directors of Avengers: Endgame, and starring Black Panther himself, this film is about a cop shutting down all the bridges around Manhattan to keep in a couple of cop killers he's hunting.

Charlie's Angels

Charlie's Angels went for more feminism than its namesake show and fellow films and it was rewarded with box-office failure. The technology-driven plot suffered from rewrites but though critics hated it, it got a very decent audience score on Rotten Tomatoes (and now the endorsement of pirates).

Knives Out

Perhaps the best murder mystery on screen in a decade, Rian Johnson's Knives Out is a wholly original story about the death of a family patriarch and the investigation into it by private detective Benoit Blanc, played to the hilt by Daniel Craig putting on a southern accent. This may be one of the few times when you'll want a sequel.

Frozen 2

The long-awaited (by 4-year-olds who won't stop singing Let It Go no matter how much parents beg) sequel arrived in 2019 and promises to be a big hit this year too.

About Our Expert

Eric Griffith

Senior Editor, Features

My Experience

I've been writing about computers, the internet, and technology professionally since 1992, more than half of that time with PCMag. I arrived at the end of the print era of PC Magazine as a senior writer. I served for a time as managing editor of business coverage before settling back into the features team for the last decade and a half. I write features on all tech topics, plus I handle several special projects, including the Readers' Choice and Business Choice surveys and yearly coverage of the Best ISPs and Best Gaming ISPs, Best Products of the Year, and Best Brands (plus the Best Brands for Tech Support, Longevity, and Reliability).

I started in tech publishing right out of college, writing and editing stories about hardware and development tools. I migrated to software and hardware coverage for families, and I spent several years exclusively writing about the then-burgeoning technology called Wi-Fi. I was on the founding staff of several magazines, including Windows Sources, FamilyPC, and Access Internet Magazine. All of which are now defunct, and it's not my fault. I have freelanced for publications as diverse as Sony Style, Playboy.com, and Flux. I got my degree at Ithaca College in, of all things, television/radio. But I minored in writing so I'd have a future.

In my long-lost free time, I wrote some novels, a couple of which are not just on my hard drive: BETA TEST ("an unusually lighthearted apocalyptic tale," according to Publishers' Weekly) and a YA book called KALI: THE GHOSTING OF SEPULCHER BAY. Go get them on Kindle.

I work from my home in Ithaca, NY, and did it long before pandemics made it cool.

The Technology I Use

My first computer was a Laser 128, an Apple II-compatible clone with an integrated keyboard, matched with an eye-straining monochrome green monitor. I used it to type papers in college for other people for money...until I discovered the Mac SE in the college computer room. That changed my life. My first cellphone was a Samsung Uproar—the silver one with the built-in MP3 player from the Napster days (the pre-iPod era).

I use an iPhone 15 Pro hourly and an iPad Air infrequently (but I'm always in the market for a cheap Android tablet). I have a PlayStation 5 just to play Spider-Man, and several Windows machines, including a work-issued Lenovo ThinkPad. I talk to Alexa and Siri all day long. I do the majority of my computing on a 15-inch LG Gram laptop attached to a Thunderbolt hub to run a multi-monitor setup—I overdid it on the power needed to simply work from home.

I'm most at home in Microsoft Word after decades of writing there. More and more, I turn to services like Google Docs, using tools like Grammarly. I use Google's Chrome browser due to an addiction to several extensions I think I can't live without, but probably could. I use Excel extensively on data-intensive stories, but for chart creation, we've switched over entirely to using Infogram for interactive features that are hard to find elsewhere. I do a lot of graphics work for my stories, but limit myself to the free and amazing Paint.NET software to edit images.

I'm a firm evangelist for using the cloud for backup and syncing of files; I'm primarily using Dropbox, which has never failed me, but I also have redundant setups on Microsoft OneDrive, plus extra picture backups on Amazon Photos and iCloud. Why take chances? For entertainment, mine is a streaming-only household—my kid has never seen network TV and barely been exposed to commercials, thanks to Roku and Amazon Music. The house is peppered with smart speakers from Amazon for instant gratification and control of smart home devices like multiple Wyze cameras and Nest Protect smoke detectors. I've got accounts on all the major social networks, to my horror. I have a robot vacuum for each floor of the house. I want a 3D printer, but not sure what I'd use it for.

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