Turns out the Scarlet Witch cast a spell on much more than just the town of Westville. Marvel’s first Disney+ TV series, WandaVision, has been the most pirated TV show of 2021. But Marvel’s other shows also dominated the top 10, with only a few — but always nerdy in nature — exceptions.
This is according to TorrentFreak, the filesharing news site, which has kept track of these stats for years when Game of Thrones ruled the proverbial pirate ship, which was followed by The Mandalorian in 2020. As for 2021, the top 10 most downloaded TV series on Bittorrent (and where you can legally watch them) are…
1) WandaVision (Disney+)
2) Loki (Disney+)
3) The Witcher (Netflix)
4) The Falcon and the Winter Soldier (Disney+)
5) Hawkeye (Disney+)
6) What If…? (Disney+)
7) Foundation (Apple TV)
8) Rick & Morty (various)
9) Arcane (Netflix)
10) The Wheel of Time (Prime Video)
As you can see, all of the five Marvel TV series released in 2021 made the cut, taking five of the top six spots. Even Hawkeye made it, which is incredibly impressive since the final episode only aired literally one week ago, on December 22. As for the others, we have two adaptations of beloved fantasy novels (The Witcher and The Wheel of Time), one adaptation of a beloved science fiction series (Foundation), one tie-in to an immensely popular video game (the League of Legends prequel Arcane), and then the most popular, cult-favourite cartoon of the last five years (Rick & Morty). I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that the people who are tech-savvy enough to go around pirating content are also very likely to be nerds, but I am surprised that they’re all apparently such hardcore Marvel fans. I also wonder if WandaVision topped the list because it was released way back in January, and thus was available for longer.
There are other caveats to these rankings; first, these numbers don’t reflect other downloads from other torrenting sites, and second, the rankings are “based on single episodes which means that season packs are underrepresented which disadvantages series that are released in one go.” So take this list with a grain of salt. If you’re a pirate on the high seas of torrenting, it should be easy enough to procure.
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