The Most Pirated Film of 2010 Is...

Courtesy of Twentieth Century-Fox

Drumroll please....Avatar is the most pirated film of the year.

The Oscar-winning mega-blockbuster was downloaded from torrent websites an amazing 16,580,000 times, according to TorrentFreak. That represents a 33% increase in download activity from last year's top-pirated film, Star Trek, which was downloaded just under 11 million times.

20th Century Fox, which distributed the sci-fi epic, isn't exactly crying. The film grossed nearly $2.8 billion at the worldwide box office to become the highest-grossing movie ever. Director James Cameron has frequently touted 3D filmmaking as the industry's best hope for combating piracy, but 3D glasses didn't hold back pirates from shattering all recorded piracy records. The financial performance of Avatar's home entertainment revenue isn't known yet, but the initial DVD release broke sales records.

Surprisingly, second on the list is Kick-Ass, distributed in the US by Lionsgate. That film recorded 11,400,000 downloads off of torrent websites and grossed a somewhat disappointing $48 million domestically (plus another $48 million overseas).

Coming in at #3 is Inception with 9,720,000 downloads. The Warner Bros. film has been the top pirated film these past couple months and was the most-pirated film last week, ahead of its DVD launch.

The Hurt Locker, which won best picture at the Academy Awards, came in as the ninth most-pirated film with nearly $7 million downloads. That's interesting because Hurt producers are currently in the middle of a lawsuit against thousands of those pirates. It was the lowest-grossing film on the list, with just under $50 million at the worldwide box office.

Here's the full list of the 10 most pirated films and number of downloads as recorded by TorrentFreak:

1. Avatar / 16,580,000
2. Kick-Ass / 11,400,000
3. Inception / 9,720,000
4. Shutter Island / 9,490,000
5. Iron Man 2 / 8,810,000
6. Clash of the Titans / 8,040,000
7. Green Zone / 7,730,000
8. Sherlock Holmes / 7,160,000
9. The Hurt Locker / 6,850,000
10. Salt / 6,700,000

'Inception' Star Leonardo DiCaprio Initially Found Script 'Incredibly Confusing'

The making of Christopher Nolan's 'Inception' presented an immense technical challenge for the cast and crew -- even starting with comprehending Nolan's complex dream-caper script.

Star Leo DiCaprio tells that even he needed time to figure out the many layers of the story.

“I needed to know implicitly where we were," he says. "It got incredibly confusing at certain points in the beginning, but the more we talked, the more I understood.”

DiCaprio, who played the lead role of Dominic Cobb, spent weeks combing through the script with Nolan.

"The work (DiCaprio) did on his character with Chris made the movie less of a puzzle and more of a story of a character audiences could relate to," says Nolan's wife and producing partner, Emma Thomas.

Other technical people on the film had their own puzzles to figure out when they had the first view of the top-secret script. Each were locked in a room on the Warners lot where the script was sealed for their first view.

Visual effects supervisor Paul Franklin recalls the note in the script which called for the entire city of Paris collapsing and folding up.

The note on the script for that scene simply said: “The city begins to fold in half.”

“Working with Chris is absolutely great, but he’s very challenging, too,” Franklin says.


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