News
’12 Years A Slave’ Topped Piracy List Before, After Oscars
Story Highlights
A week before the Oscars were handed out March 2, online BitTorrent tracking site TorrentFreak already had Best Picture winner 12 Years a Slave as No. 1 on its list of most recently pirated films.
After the Oscars it only got worse: after 12 Years a Slave won the most coveted award in Hollywood, illegal downloads of the film tripled the next day, with more than 100,000 week-over-week additional illegal downloads, according to TorrentFreak’s data.
“Perhaps it’s not much of a surprise, but the day after the Oscar award ceremony the winning films are in high demand among pirates,” a TorrentFreak editor wrote. “The number of people sharing ‘12 Years A Slave’ via BitTorrent tripled, and the number of [Best Picture nominee] ‘Gravity’ downloads more than doubled.”
Indeed, films nominated for Best Picture have long seen a spike in illegal fire sharing right before and immediately after the Oscars, with leaked screeners often blamed for the high-quality downloads available online.
However, if data from Home Media Magazine is any indication, those online, illegal offerings won’t keep 12 Years a Slave distributor 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment from enjoying a field day with the home entertainment release of the film.
Despite the availability of illegal downloads, every recent Best Picture winner — from The Hurt Locker The King’s Speech to The Artist to Argo — has been at or near the top of the home entertainment sellthrough and rental charts.
And thanks to Digital HD — the pre-disc availability of new release content weeks before disc, an industry endeavor pioneered by Fox — 12 Years a Slave is already enjoying the home entertainment success of its Best Picture predecessors, according to a report from Variety.
Other than the late-2013 Digital HD offering of The Wolverine, 12 Years a Slave has already outpaced every Fox film offered on digital before disc, according to the studio.
