Pretty sure it's real. I spent a lot of time tracking down who owned the rights to "The big Lebowski" About a year ago, with the plans of developing a lebowski pin with a friend who has made his own homebrew pins from scratch. We didn't want to waste our time developing it without a chance of actually licensing the pin, for production. Took a few weeks, finally got the person I needed to speak with, and explained what were doing, and what we would like to do.

Came to an agreement, that we could get it licensed, for 250 units, for 12,500.00 and let them know we were a good 2 years out on something good enough to consider for production. We left it at that, and to contact her when we were further along on development. Fast forward a few months later, and she calls to see how we are doing, and if we were ready to purchase licensing. I said we are just in the planning stages, and working on layout, content, etc. She says we can lock you in on licensing, it would be 85,000.00 I said, uhhhh no.. you said 12,500.00 and then she goes on this long winded story of how the movie is a "hot commodity" and I said yeah, 10+ year old movies with no sequel are just on fire, and thanks for nothing.

Looks like someone else expressed interest and that drove the price through the roof. The first time I pitched the idea of a themed pin she didn't even seem to care.