It’s the 29th of December, which means we are all now sick of Top 10 lists. There are Top 10 lists of Top 10 list. Except this particular Top 10 list is actually pretty informative, collating the year’s illegal torrent data to tell us which films people wanted to see but weren’t willing to pay for. #1 is really awful.

Yeah. That’s right. The latest installment in the Fast & Furious franchise, Fast Five, was the most shared movie on BitTorrent in 2011, with 9 million downloads, with a comfortable lead over The Hangover II and Thor, in second and third place respectively.

It’s an awkward field to judge, given the amount of torrent sites out there, but BitTorrent is probably as good an indicator as any other.

There’s a fair amount of pretty insightful analysis going on over at TorrentFreak – they’ve also got a list of the 50 most popular search terms.

“The total number of downloads for Fast Five pales in comparison to last year’s victor Avatar which was downloaded more than 16 million times. This downward trend is also visible throughout the rest of the top 10, where the average number of downloads is lower than in 2010.

In part this drop might be explained by the increase in legal alternatives … however, since the total number of active BitTorrent users isn’t shrinking, the downloads may simply be spread out over more titles in 2011.

As is the case every year, our top 10 lists have a few notable absentees in 2011. These include the top grossing Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides and Transformers: Dark of the Moon. On the other hand, 127 Hours and Sucker Punch were both hugely popular among the downloading public, while their box office grosses were relatively modest.”

I’m going to go ahead and guess that people downloaded things like Fast Five and I Am Number Four because they were ashamed of going into theatres to watch those in public.

[Source: TorrentFreak]