With 16,580,000 downloads on BitTorrent alone, Avatar is undisputedly the most pirated film of the year.

Never before have we seen this many downloads of a movie in a single year. This honor previously belonged to last year’s winner Star Trek with 10,960,000 downloads, but Avatar quashed this previous record.

Earlier this year we already crowned Avatar as the most downloaded Blu-ray film ever, with 200,000 downloads in just 4 days. In the months that followed the number of Blu-ray downloads of Avatar have exceeded two million.

Another expected entry in the list of most pirated movies in 2010 is The Hurt Locker. This film was already available on BitTorrent for most of 2009, but really started to gain attention from the public after it won six Oscars.

This huge success online compared to the meager box-office earnings was most likely one of the reasons why the makers of the film sued thousands of alleged BitTorrent users last spring. Despite the looming threat of legal action the downloads continued pretty much undeterred, resulting in a 9th place in todays list.

As every year there are also a few notable absentees, such as the two best grossing movies at the box-office this year, Toy Story 3 and Alice in Wonderland. On the other hand, Kick-Ass and Green Zone were both hugely popular among the downloading public, while their box office grosses were relatively modest.

The data for this list is collected by TorrentFreak from several sources, including reports from thousands of BitTorrent trackers. All release formats, including cammed versions are counted. Afterwards, the data is carefully checked and corrected.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.