Were you betting on Sinners to take home the Best Picture award from the 98th Oscars? Or did you know all along that One Battle After Another would win?

If you didn't see the most talked-about films from this year (and they haven't come out to stream yet), then you're probably searching online for screeners. Studios send these advance film prints to academy members as part of their voting process, but they are predictably leaked on torrent sites during the awards season.

Cybernews looks back at the most-pirated Oscar nominees over the last 15 years.

P.S. Not only is it illegal to download the movies, Cybernews' exclusive investigation reveals that top movie torrents are also swarming with malware.

2010: Blockbusters meet prestige

The 2010 piracy landscape provided one of the clearest early overlaps between Oscar recognition and large-scale downloading. But some of the results were surprising.

James Cameron's Avatar was illegally downloaded via BitTorrent more than 16.6 million times, making it the most pirated film of the year. But it was Kathryn Bigelow who made history by beating her ex-husband to become the first woman to win the Oscars for the low-budget movie The Hurt Locker.

Far away from the overlong acceptance speeches, the figures on illegal downloads told a different story. It was the big-budget nominated movie that became the biggest hit on torrent sites.

A huge global release based on a well-known franchise, and/or large-scale advertising efforts, are typically the most popular films for piracy. Large global releases will always attract the most downloads once they hit the internet. However, being nominated for an Oscar does not mean a film will be safe from piracy. In some instances, the nomination for an Oscar may actually increase piracy of a film.

The nomination of a film can introduce it to an audience who may have been unable to see it during its theatrical run. The film's introduction to a larger audience extends its attention beyond the credits rolling.

The nomination factor sparked a torrent of interest during the 87th Academy Awards season.

In 2010, Best Picture Nominee, American Sniper, was reported to be the most frequently torrented Oscar-Nominated film in dozens of countries. More than a million illegal downloads of the movie were reported within a relatively short period of time.

In addition to the increased number of illegal downloads reported for Selma, a study found that it was also one of the few movies nominated for an Oscar whose illegal downloads rose by more than 1,000% after the nominations were announced.

According to the study, both the number of illegal downloads per movie and the percentage increase in illegal downloads per movie make it difficult to determine which movie was most pirated.

In this case, while one movie is likely to have more illegal downloads due to hype, another may see greater illegal downloads as a result of greater audience exposure from the attention surrounding its Oscar nomination.

2019: Screeners and award season leaks

During the 91st Academy Awards, leaked screeners once again received renewed attention. Roma, Green Book, and The Favourite are all best picture nominees. Before their theatrical releases were complete, leaked DVD screeners for a few contenders surfaced online.

Leaked screeners had Blu-Ray quality and displayed an obvious watermark on screen informing users that they were not permitted to redistribute. However, when combined with award nominations, leaked screeners became a marketing tool.

Piracy became intertwined with awards campaigning. The more widely a screener circulated among voting bodies and the moviegoing public, the more all parties could understand which movies had the most buzz or were loved by audiences.

2023: Cultural momentum and malware

By the 95th Academy Awards, piracy dynamics had evolved further.

Everything Everywhere All at Once dominated both awards headlines and cultural conversation. Predictably, piracy activity surged once again. But the film was also among those most frequently packaged with malware in pirated copies circulating online.

The conversation around piracy had shifted beyond unauthorized viewing or illegal downloading. High-profile titles increasingly become vectors for malicious distribution, exploiting spikes in public curiosity. Awards visibility drives search demand. But the plot twist was that search demand attracted cybercriminal opportunists.

2025: The post-win effect

Reporting around Anora suggests that download counts increased sharply following its Oscar success, with some tracking samples indicating downloads more than quadrupled in the aftermath of the ceremony.

Independent films are particularly sensitive to this effect. A win can introduce the title to international audiences who may not have had easy legal access before the awards night. The surge reflects delayed discovery as much as infringement intent.

In these cases, Oscar's victory acts as a global marketing accelerator, sometimes outpacing distribution availability.

When a blockbuster also earns nominations, it is likely to dominate piracy charts. When a smaller prestige film earns unexpected nominations, it often sees a dramatic increase in illegal downloads. Leaked screeners amplify risk during campaign season. Post-win surges are common, particularly for independent films.

Most importantly, piracy tracks attention. Awards season concentrates global attention into a compressed window. That visibility increases both legitimate interest and unauthorized access attempts.

The rise of Stremio, Torrentio, and Real Debrid

A large number of consumers are moving away from manually downloading pirated copies of movies, TV shows, etc., and are turning to real-time torrent streaming. Stremio is an example of a platform that bridges traditional peer-to-peer sharing methods with a more visual and more accessible app-based experience for audiences

Stremio claimed to have roughly 5 million users in 2017 and now claims 30+ million users, indicating that torrent streaming technology has officially become a mainstream method for accessing entertainment content.

Although Stremio is presented as a legitimate media center application, much of its success is due to third-party plugins/addons (like Torrentio), which scrape torrent indexes and pair with services like Real-Debrid to create cached files for easier viewing.

Instead of searching for files to download, then having to seed them so others can download, non-technical users can search, select, and watch immediately through a clean, visually appealing interface.

While the technology itself is neutral, the responsibility for ensuring that the copyrighted material being viewed or accessed lies with the consumer/user. Although the product's interface feels more akin to mainstream streaming products, the legal and security concerns have not vanished. But this has not prevented tech-savvy audiences from viewing every single one of this year's Oscar-nominated motion pictures without paying.

And the winner of the most pirated film of 2026 is…

Despite Sinners receiving considerable Oscar buzz, it has been available to the public for almost a year, which disqualifies it from consideration as the most pirated Oscar-nominated film.

According to both torrent download charts and actual download numbers, Timothée Chalamet in Marty Supreme is currently receiving the most attention. This is one of those films that casual moviegoers were somewhat undecided about, given the premise of a motion picture about table tennis. However, it appears curiosity is getting the better of casual moviegoers.

The strong cast of Paul Thomas Anderson's One Battle After Another, featuring Leonardo De-Caprio and Sean Penn stealing scenes as Steven J. Lockjaw, also places it high in the illegal download charts. But the big question is whether Jessie Buckley's inevitable win will be enough to cause a spike in Torrent downloads?

Although our lives have been transformed by technology over the last decade, very little has changed. The big winners this year will once again cause a spike in illegal downloads, and users are still scrambling over award screeners and dodgy downloads. The only real difference is that piracy now has a more user-friendly interface.

Before you download this year's Oscar-nominated movies...

The Academy Awards are a celebration of film excellence and a platform for the world to see what has been accomplished in cinema, creating FOMO for movie fans everywhere. Ultimately, nobody wants to be the person who hasn't watched the must-see movie everyone is talking about.

When millions of people are all searching for the same movie at the same time, it creates an increased demand, which then sends a signal of opportunity to cybercriminals looking for easy ways to tempt users into clicking a download link on an infected site.

In the weeks leading up to the Oscars and immediately after the winner announcements are made, you will find fake torrent sites offering "free" Oscar-nominated films, malicious malware masquerading as a video codec, phishing pages claiming to offer "exclusive" access to the movies before anyone else, and rogue streaming websites providing illegal viewing options.

For attackers, an Oscar frontrunner is a ready-made social engineering campaign. If you are tempted to click download on a file named after an oscar nominated movie, remember you could be inviting far more than a two-hour runtime onto your device.

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