The Most Pirated Show Of 2021 Revealed
This article is more than 2 years old
Although we can’t really recommend pirating your entertainment content, it is interesting to see which shows people didn’t want to pay for the most. This year, according to Torrent Freak, the show that took the crown of the most pirated show of 2021 goes to the Disney+ series WandaVision. The miniseries was able to knock the other hugely popular Disney+ series The Mandalorian off of the top spot from last year. The second season of The Mandalorian did premiere in late 2020, with WandaVision premiering in early 2021, so this probably helped give the Marvel series a boost.
Marvel can be seen all over Torrent Freak’s top ten most pirated show of 2021 list. In addition to WandaVision, you have Loki in second place and The Falcon and the Winter Soldier in fourth place. Hawkeye landed in fifth place and Marvel’s animated What If…? series took sixth. This is literally every Marvel series released for Marvel’s slate of Phase 4 content, so it’s clear that fans want to be caught up. Marvel is known for their massive interconnected cinematic universe, so missing any of their content means you might be slightly out of the loop with references or storylines in the next release. While this model definitely leads to more subscriptions to their Disney+ service, it also means more pirating for people who want to be caught up but don’t want to shell out for an additional streaming service.
The rest of the most pirated show of 2021 list is void of Disney+ content, so it looks like their Marvel properties are definitely the most in-demand. Though we wouldn’t be surprised if the upcoming The Book of Boba Fett series sees The Mandalorian level numbers. Netflix wasn’t able to escape the top ten of torrents, with two of their exclusive shows making the list. The new season of The Witcher landed in third place and the sleeper hit Arcane nabbed the ninth spot. Amazon and Apple TV made the list with their exclusive series as well. Apple’s Foundation based on the classic Isaac Asimov books got the seventh-place spot. Amazon’s epic fantasy series Wheel of Time, also based on a book series, found itself in the tenth place. And the ever-popular Rick and Morty is number eight.
What’s especially notable about this list is that, with the exceptions of Rick and Morty and The Witcher, all of these shows are in their first season. It just goes to show how powerful franchise names are. It’s not very common for an unknown IP to be hugely popular in its first season. But when your show is a Marvel show, based on a popular video game, or based on a popular book series, you can definitely pull in more viewers and torrenters apparently. It remains to be seen if we’ll see these Marvel shows on this list in 2022, though it’s unlikely. Loki and What If…? are up for second seasons, but seasons for the other Marvel shows have yet to be announced. WandaVision ended pretty definitively and likely won’t be seeing a sweason 2. So it will just have to enjoy(?) its one-time title as the most pirated show of 2021.
