10 People Who Copied Movies In Disturbing Ways

9. A Trio Of Bank Robbers Modelled Their Crimes On The Town's Central Crooks

The Town movie poster
Warner Bros. Pictures

Ben Affleck's 2010 crime epic The Town is one of the smartest thrillers of modern times, and in fact, its bank heist sequences are so engaging that a trio of thugs was actually inspired to copy them in real life.

The three young men devised a plan to rob a cheque-cashing store in Queens, taking inspiration from the Hollywood hit while mapping out their scheme.

They committed the crime by hiding their faces under expensive white masks (they cost around $1,000 each), which, reportedly, were not too dissimilar to the creepy, somewhat ghostly ones worn by the law-breakers in Affleck's movie. They also covered their tracks by using bleach, again taking inspiration from the crooks in the film.

The men then went on a shopping spree after making off with around $200,000, but in an odd twist, it turned out that one of them had actually emailed the mask-maker to say thank you, which led to all three of them being caught.

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Contributor

Danny has been with WhatCulture for over ten years, and is currently Doctor Who Editor and WhoCulture Channel Manager, overseeing all of WhatCulture's Whoniverse coverage. In 2022, he took charge of WhoCulture and has grown it into the biggest Doctor Who channel on YouTube, and one of the biggest Doctor Who communities on the web full-stop. He has been writing and video editing since his early teens, and first got a taste for content creation after making his own Doctor Who trailers, off the back of a burning obsession with the Matt Smith era of the show. Like many his age, he first got into Doctor Who with the 2005 revival, but has since gone back and fallen in love with the classic years too. If you need someone to recite every Doctor Who episode in order, or to give you a random factoid about the making of Gridlock, Danny is the person to ask!