Pirate Ratings 2021

As described by Kavita Philip in Your Computer is On Fire, the Alpha60 project measures tv/film/video popularity on peer-to-peer networks, and uses that information to create a public and reception-focused index of popularity over time. This peer-reception index is independent of the limited, sanitized, and often-suspect information released by the streaming platforms themselves.

For more results from previous, please see Year 2020 In Review, Year 2019 In Review, etc.

The following is a list of select media objects and the number of unique peers (bittorrent protocol) associated with that media object (in millions), measured in week increments. There is no geographic segmentation in this presentation: this data covers the entire internet.

Please note that by “select” above, this list does not include all media objects released in the year 2021. Therefore, is not a comprehensive ranking of all media objects released in all global markets in 2021. It’s just sixty specific media objects. (It is not even inclusive of all Alpha60 sample activity over the past year.) It excludes several media objects (Squid Games, Venom, Black Widow, F9, Cruella, Mortal Kombat) that were distributed widely and enjoyed throughout the globe, known to be huge at the box office and with social media, yet unsampled by Alpha-60 and thus data-free.

##	MEDIA OBJECT NAME	1 week	10 week	15 week	26 week	(x) week
01	Godzilla vs. Kong	4.75	27.25	33.73	41.63
02	The Tomorrow War	3.5	21.48	25.38	29.74
03	Suicide Squad 2021	4.56	21.20	24.09	28.52
04	Raya and the Last Dragon	3.1	18.15	23	29.2
05	Shang Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings	5.57	18.08	21.52
06	Matrix Resurrections	5.5	18.05
07	Dune: Part One	4	17.40	21.15
08	Loki 106	2.98	16.78	18.69
09	No Time to Die	4.85	16.64	19.78
–
10	Loki 101	2.53	15.69
11	Wonder Woman 1984	5.7	14.92	16.87
12	Mandalorian 208	3.25	14.2	17.08	21.97
13	The Falcoln and the Winter Soldier 101	1.3	11.51
14	The Falcoln and the Winter Soldier 106	1.96	10.93	13.46
15	WandaVision 101	2.2	10.41
16	Money Heist 5 Volume 1	2.17	9.91	12.44
17	WandaVision 109	1.4	9.76	15.34	21.54
18	Witcher 02	2.37	8.78
19	Lupin 2	0.8	8.6	11.29
–
20	Demon Slayer Kimetsu No Yaiba The Movie Mugen Train					20.54 (45)
21	One Piece 95x				11.72
22	Shadow & Bone	1	8.56	10.5
23	Army of the Dead	1.78	8.55	11.73
24	Don’t Look Up	1.8	8.26
25	Coming 2 America	1.5				3.3 (3)
26	What If 101?	1.2	7.4	8.32
27	Mitchells vs. The Machines	0.95	6.96
28	Intergalactic 01	0.87	5.9
29	Love, Death, Robots 02	0.52	5.62
–
30	Underground Railroad	0.75	5.6
31	Yasuke	0.45	5.55
32	Cinderella 2021	1.04	5.13
33	Outside The Wire	1.5	5.18
34	Money Heist 5 Volume 2	0.98	4.9
35	Foundation 101	1.13	4.64
36	No Sudden Move	0.63	4.52
37	Outer Banks 02	0.32	4.26
38	Trese 01	0.41	4.16
39	Snowpiercer 209	0.3	4.04
–
40	Y The Last Man 101	1.17	4.17
41	Halston 01	0.32	4.03
42	Archer 1201	0.67	3.57
43	Ted Lasso 201	0.49	3.49
44	The Beatles: Get Back	0.62	3.45
45	Prisoners of the Ghostland	1.07	3.39
46	Debris 113	0.39	3.2
47	Queen of the South 510	0.36	3.24
48	Invasion 101	0.8	3.1
49	Cowboy Bebop 2021	0.58	3.09
–
50	Reservation Dogs 101	0.32	2.64
51	Yellowjackets 110	0.315				0.8 (4)
52	Kung Fu 113	0.29	2.49
53	For All Mandkind 210	0.22	2.35
54	The Harder They Fall	0.66	2.13
55	Only Murders In the Building 110	0.2	2.17
56	Star Wars Visions 01	0.38	2.1
57	Expanse 601	0.417	2
58	Mother / Android	0.39	1.7
59	Succession 301	0.19	1.35
60	Detective Chinatown 3	0.26	1.06	1.6	4

Notes on 2021

• The rise of Asian content.
  
  Japanese production companies sampled included: Demon Slayer, One Piece, Prisoners of the Ghostland, etc. Co-productions and influenced included Cowboy Bebop 2021, Godzilla vs. Kong, Yasuke, Blade Runner Black Lotus, Star Wars Visions, etc. Chinese diaspora and Americas in Detective Chinatown 3, Raya, Shang Chi, Kung Fu, etc. India in Never Have I Ever, etc. Although China took the global box office in 2020 (and likely 2021) and is the leading consumer of media, Japan and South Korea were the high-impact global cultural exporters this year. Without a doubt, South Korea’s Squid Games would have been one of the higher-sampling media objects, but this media object traveled under the radar and snuck by the sample scheduler. Many of the media objects created by this region defy serial length and duration traditions and packaging of USA-centered media texts: Demon Slayer was released in theaters in Japan in December 2020 and took months to arrive in a digital form.
  
  
• What is a season?
  
  More arbitrary season continuations, breaks, and numbering. Lupin and Money Heist took a page out of the Walking Dead handbook (followed by Ozark so far in 2022), and started to break up what were once continuous seasons of one to twelve episode into two or more chunks of six or more episodes, with a gap at least months apart. On the other hand, One Piece has no concept of seasons and just monotonic releases week after week, etc. Experimentation with what duration to use when serializing media is trending…