EXCLUSIVE: Disney+/Marvel’s Hawkeye was the most shared TV series title among pirate networks for the week of Nov. 22-28 according to MUSO, while Amazon Prime’s The Wheel of Time ranked second.
Such are the calamities for an entertainment industry obsessed with streaming: If there’s a pristine copy of a movie or series available on the web, consider it feasibly available around the world for free. The first episode of Hawkeye according to Samba TV, was watched by 1.5M U.S. Smart TV households over the 5-day Thanksgiving stretch, repping a -40% decline next to the 5-day viewership of Disney+/Marvel’s Loki which pulled in 2.5M.
Also crowding the most-pirated series list of the last week are hot titles such as Paramount+’s Dexter: New Blood, Star Trek: Discovery Season 4, Netflix’s Arcane and Disney+’s Peter Jackson documentary The Beatles: Get Back.
To that point, Sony’s Venom: Let There Be Carnage is topping the most shared pirated title among movies worldwide. How is that? The movie, which opened on Oct. 1, respected a 45-day theatrical window and became available on PVOD and SVOD recently, which means clean copies are now available out there in the ether. The sequel has grossed close to $470M WW; Sony a big believer in the theatrical window and forgoing any type of hybrid strategy which other studios continue to play with. Again, the longer the theatrical window, the longer the delay that a clean copy of the film is made available.
Pablo Larrain/Neon/Courtesy Everett Collection
On this week’s most pirated movies list from MUSO, four titles had a streaming launch at some point in the last five months: Red Notice (Netflix), Dune (HBO Max), Black Widow (Disney+) and Finch (AppleTV)+, while the remaining seven make the list on account of their availability on PVOD or SVOD; a new entry this week being NEON’s awards season contender Spencer.
Despite its theatrical day-and-date launch, Warner Bros’ Dune has become the studio’s second highest grossing movie of the year worldwide with $374.2M behind Legendary’s Godzilla vs. Kong ($467.8M), another title that was part of WarnerMedia’s HBO Max 2021 hybrid pandemic release plan. The Denis Villeneuve directed movie became the second to cross $100M at the domestic B.O. for Warners this year after GvK, proving there was a portion of the audience that wanted to watch it in its Imax-intended form (70 minutes were shot in Imax by Villeneuve). Dune is returning to Imax auditoriums this weekend, and is off HBO Max for another month, however, the damage is done: The sci-fi feature is still out there being pirated due to its original day-and-date availability in homes and theaters. Legendary and Villeneuve have ensured that Dune 2 will be exclusive to theaters when it opens Oct. 20, 2023.
The most-torrented movies and TV series is defined as the most-shared files between piracy peer-to-peer networks.
London-based Muzzle is a data company that provides a complete view of global piracy and unlicensed media consumption. The analytics outfit measures global piracy, monitoring all major forms of piracy activity including streaming, web downloads, public and private torrents, and stream rippers. MUSO’s data drives content protection, audience measurement and monetization.
