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Welcome to R slash Ask Reddit, where people answer the question,

what's the dumbest idea you've seen that actually worked?

Our first replies from Lejuni.

How the movie Cowboys and Aliens got made.

The property had been optioned but never used.

They then made a graphic novel out of it,

priced way under what a comic book that size would normally cost.

Then they offered the comics in bulk to large comic shop chains around the country with the promise

that if they bought a thousand dollars worth of comics, they would get a thousand dollar check

back from the publisher. Several comic chains did it, and they got their thousand dollars back,

as promised. It seems like a bonkers marketing strategy. Until they then used those sales

numbers to go back to Hollywood and show them

they had the biggest selling graphic novel in the country. And it worked. A studio picked up the

script and got it made. Our next reply is from Sobupin. I grew up in the foster care system. At one home,

the foster dad was chief of police. He also had a farm in the northern

part of the state. He brought us foster kids up to the farm one weekend. A few days after getting

home, he found that one of his guns was missing. After days of nobody saying anything, one of the

kids admitted to taking it and bringing it to the farm where he got scared and tossed it into a field.

We spent the next two days walking through extremely tall grass looking for the thing.

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