Does art imitate life or influence it? Hollywood would have you think bank robbers are master planners — armed to the teeth, technically gifted,
impeccably dressed and disproportionately Bostonian.
But Federal Bureau of Investigation data tells us real-life bank robberies have dropped dramatically in recent decades, and they only get violent 3% of the time.
Despite the hard data, bank security systems are heavily influenced by the movies —many real-life banks have taken cues from cinematic heists, adding security cameras, armed guards, loud alarm systems — because that’s what people who’ve watched a lot of heist films expect.
“In reality, alarms and cameras don’t stop robberies,” Walt Hickey writes in his 2023 book, “You Are What You Watch: How Movies and TV Affect Everything.” “The reason for half the bells and whistles in your standard bank is to appease the public’s desire for ostentatious displays of security.”
When robberies happen, they don’t play out like the movies. Thieves are more likely to hand a note to a teller, silently demanding money, than they are to crack into a vault. And they typically walk away with small bounties — an average of $9,295 in 2013. Hickey analyzed 190 heist films made from 1930 to 2018 to find Hollywood’s staged robberies involved sums much higher, an average of $22.2 million. |