Congratulations, The Hobbit, You Are This Year’s Most Pirated Film

An Unexpected Journey, the first installment of the Hobbit trilogy, was kept neither secret nor safe this year.

The temptation of making humorous gif sets was too much for the poor hobbits of the internet. And I’m sure there were also some folks who wanted to watch the movie without paying for it.

The info jockeys at Torrent Freak have numbers that say that Journey was downloaded illegally close to eight-and-a-half million times this year, edging out the year’s best grossing release, Iron Man 3, by by eight hundred thousand. Other front runners included Django Unchained, Silver Linings Playbook, Star Trek Into Darkness, World War Z, and The Hangover Part 3. What might be most interesting about this list is that it’s missing many of this year’s top grossing releases. Some of the top ten grossing films that weren’t in the top ten pirated? The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, Man of Steel, and Gravity.

This news comes after the reveal that Game of Thrones is television’s most pirated show for a second year running. Is there something about fantasy fiction that stirs people to take matters into their own hands? Something about the lure of a material possession or the acquisition of power that motivates them?

Or maybe it was just really hard to find in streaming anywhere?

(via The Hollywood Reporter.)