Box office earnings often say a lot about any film’s popularity, but more obscure numbers tell a similar story. 2022’s piracy charts highlight many of Marvel and DC's blockbusters and Uncharted and Top Gun: Maverick as the movies with more illegal downloads worldwide.

While piracy has always been a concern for movie studios, the increased importance of streaming, new platforms like Disney Plus, HBO Max, and Paramount Plus, and shorter theatrical release windows for big-budget movies have all combined to make internet pirates’ jobs a bit easier. After all, once any given piece of content becomes available digitally, it’s only a matter of minutes before it finds its way to illegal download sites, especially in countries where legit services are more cost prohibitive or simply unavailable to their populations.

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Thanks to Variety's reporting on content piracy and data gathered by the piracy-focused researchers at Muso, it’s possible to know that Tom Cruise's exploits in the Top Gun sequel were no match for superhero movies. Spider-Man: No Way Home was the absolute winner by netting roughly 21% of piracy traffic in 2022. The top 5 spots are all taken by comic book characters, with The Batman (13%), Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (10%), Thor: Love and Thunder (9%), and Black Adam (9%) leading the rankings.

Nate and Gage from the Uncharted Movie

Surprisingly, the first non-superpowered individual is Tom Holland's Nathan Drake. So, while Uncharted's $401m box office revenue pales in comparison to Top Gun: Maverick's $1.489 billion, Sony’s video game adaptation arrival on Netflix made it quite the hit in sketchy domains. Much like in Disney Plus' real streaming charts, Eternals ranked high (8%), as Top Gun: Maverick (8%), Jurassic World Dominion (7%), and Encanto (6%) close out a top 10 that add up to around 91% of all illegal downloads.

Several factors come into play to determine what makes a movie popular among pirates, though many of them correlate to their success on licensed streaming platforms, as seen from Black Adam, Uncharted, and Eternals' viewership, movies that many preferred to put on their “wait for streaming” list. Perhaps Paramount’s strategy with Top Gun: Maverick could be a template for studios in the future since the movie’s profits were certainly boosted by it going way past the 45-day release window that’s become the norm in Hollywood.

China closing off its borders to the MCU and DC must have made superhero movies more popular among pirates. However, with Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania signaling Marvel's return to the mainland, Avatar: The Way of Water looks like a clear-cut favorite to take the crown in 2023.

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Source: Variety