Turbo Kid a top hit with pirates

Munro Chambers is Turbo Kid and Laurence Leboeuf is Apple in the New Zealand film.

A Kiwi-made film has hit the big time - but for all the wrong reasons.

Turbo Kid shot to the No 1 spot on illegal download site Kickass Torrents, with 80,000 views in just 24 hours and a total of 230,000 hits, before being temporarily removed.

It beat out popular movies such as Southpaw, Jurassic World and Terminator Genisys, but Kiwi producer Ant Timpson says it's not a positive thing.

While piracy is an age-old issue for film-makers, it has hit independents the hardest.

"It's quite unusual for us, it was most downloaded on the day. For a small independent film it's strange," Timpson said.

"It was up there with all the big studio blockbusters - it's a complicated problem with torrenting, it happens with all films."

After four years working on Turbo Kid and producers deferring all fees, the team needed a payoff at the end, Timpson said.

If they got a dollar from every download, "we would be rich", he said.

"The company we work with issued a take-down notice, but the numbers are staggering. There are 11,000 infringing links and we are only talking about one of them hitting well over 200,000.

"It's also these ridiculous arguments that drive me nuts - from the apologetic, to those saying there's some benefit to piracy for independent film-makers. It's not true."

Timpson said if the film wasn't available in a viewer's region it could be found at turbokid.com.

Piracy affected another New Zealand production, Sione's 2: Unfinished Business in 2012, after a member of staff made DVD copies that were leaked to the public weeks before the film's cinema release.

South Pacific Pictures estimated it lost up to $1 million in box office takings because of the leak.