In Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One, Ethan Hunt races a rogue artificial intelligence called the Entity for a two-piece key that can control it. The chase crosses the Empty Quarter, Abu Dhabi, Rome and Venice before a night train runs into the Alps and a bridge is blown.
Almost every stop is a real place: the desert and airport in the Emirates, a car chase through Rome, a party at the Doge's Palace, a cliff jump at Hellesylt in Norway, and the Alpine train sequence doubled on a Yorkshire heritage railway and in a Peak District quarry.
A CIA officer called the Protagonist joins Tenet, a secret organisation fighting a war across time. Inverted bullets and a Russian oligarch named Sator pull him from a Kyiv opera house to Mumbai, Oslo, the Amalfi Coast and Tallinn, chasing a device sent back from the future.
This route follows the film's real locations: Tallinn's Linnahall standing in for the Kyiv opera house, Colaba in Mumbai, the Oslo freeport sequence, the gardens of Villa Cimbrone above Amalfi, the Tallinn streets of the car chase and the California ghost town used for Stalsk-12. The Oslo Freeport and Stalsk-12 are fictional, so their pins mark the real places the film points to.
Bond's final outing opens beside a lake in Norway and closes on an island in the Faroe Islands, with a long detour through southern Italy and a retirement in Jamaica in between. The story's geography is real: Matera's cave lanes, a bridge over the Gravina gorge, a railway station at Sapri, a waterfront house at Port Antonio, the Atlantic Ocean Road and the cliffs of Kalsoy.
The route follows the film's order — the frozen-lake flashback, the grave and the bridge, the Matera car chase, the farewell at Sapri, five quiet years in Jamaica and the 'Cuban' harbour that is really Port Antonio, then the Norway drive and the villain's island in the Faroe Islands. The beach house in Jamaica and the lake house in Norway were sets, both since dismantled.
Gotham is Chicago. The film shot most of Batman's city on real streets and buildings in the Loop, dressing them up as Gotham, then flew the crew to Hong Kong for its one overseas detour. This route follows The Dark Knight in order, from the bank heist that opens it to the rooftop where Batman and the Joker have their last fight.
Along the way: the disused post office that doubled as a bank, the glass office where Wayne holds a fundraiser, the financial street of the convoy chase, the hospital the Joker destroys, an old Chicago bar, the pier where two ferries wait, and Hong Kong's International Finance Centre.
In 1984 Ghostbusters sent three Columbia parapsychologists into the ghost-removal business, armed with proton packs and a converted firehouse. The film turned a handful of real New York addresses into a haunted city, from the marble reading room of the New York Public Library to the apartment block that becomes Spook Central.
Most of the exterior landmarks survive and can be visited, though the Sedgewick Hotel's interiors were filmed on the other side of the country, at a grand downtown Los Angeles hotel. This route follows the film's story from the first library ghost to the rooftop battle with Gozer.
Hill Valley is fictional, but almost all of it is Los Angeles. The 1985 film sends Marty McFly thirty years back to a small California town, and the filmmakers built its square on a studio backlot and dressed real malls, schools, churches and houses around the city as Hill Valley. This route follows the story from the Twin Pines Mall car park in City of Industry through 1955 and back to the McFly home in Arleta.
Each stop is a real place that played a piece of Hill Valley; the private homes are seen from the street only.
A feather drifts down onto a bench in Savannah, and a man starts to talk. His life unrolls across half a century of American history, from an Alabama childhood to the jungles of Vietnam, the Lincoln Memorial, the Watergate and a bayou shrimp boat.
This route follows the film in order, from the bench on Chippewa Square to the lighthouse in Maine and the desert where the running finally stops. It marks the real locations and the real stand-ins, since the fictional town of Greenbow and the Vietnam jungle were both played by South Carolina.
A shy waitress at a Montmartre café staffed and frequented by eccentrics finds a metal box of childhood memorabilia hidden behind a bathroom tile and gets drawn into the lives around her: practical jokes on the nasty greengrocer Collignon, street scenes described aloud to a blind man, and a dropped photo album belonging to Nino, a collector of discarded photo-booth pictures.
The route follows her Paris from the café on Rue Lepic to the photo booths of the Gare de l'Est and the blue arrows on the steps of the Sacré-Cœur, taking in skipping stones on the Canal Saint-Martin and a surge of love on the Pont des Arts along the way. Nearly every stop is a real place you can visit.
Forza Horizon 4, released on 2 October 2018, turns Great Britain into one giant racetrack: an open world with condensed representations of Edinburgh, the Scottish Highlands, the Lake District and the Cotswolds, where seasons change every week and Derwentwater freezes hard enough to drive across. Microsoft counted 24 million players by November 2020, and Polygon found the game world a theme-park version of England where everything has "the faint whiff of an idealised 1950s about it, a place of ordered pub gardens and rosebushes".
This route drives the real Britain behind the game, north to south: Edinburgh's Old Town, Bamburgh Castle on its coastal crag, three Lake District stops at Derwentwater, Ambleside and Tarn Hows, and the honey-coloured village of Broadway in the Cotswolds. Every stop can be visited today.
Kalos is Metropolitan France turned into a star-shaped Pokémon region. Lumiose City is inspired by Paris, its Prism Tower by the Eiffel Tower and its art museum by the Louvre; the Battle Château recalls Chenonceau on the Loire, the palais Chaydeuvre is the château de Versailles, and the stones outside Geosenge Town are the Carnac stones. The games never confirm their models — these are fan and encyclopaedia identifications — so every pin on this route is speculative.
The route follows the story across the real France behind Kalos: the town where the adventure begins, Lumiose's iron tower, two châteaux and a royal palace, a coastal aquarium, the island tower where Mega Evolution is learned, the cathedral clock behind Anistar's sundial, the Breton megalith field where Team Flare hides its ultimate weapon, and an abandoned mine where the legendary Zygarde sleeps.
The Galar region is Britain played back as a game: a fictional land inspired by the United Kingdom, dotted with landmarks that recall Bath and York, crowned by a London of clock towers and football-stadium gyms. Eight gym cities, eight badges, and then the Champion's Cup in Wyndon, where Leon waits and the Darkest Day breaks.
This route walks the real Britain behind that map, south to north and then beyond: a chalk giant, a lighthouse, Roman baths, a minster, a national stadium and a clock tower, plus the two downloadable lands, the Isle of Man and the snows of Scotland. Every identification is a fan or developer reading, never confirmed in the games, so every pin here is speculative.
In 1868, at the onset of the Second Industrial Revolution, twin Assassins Jacob and Evie Frye come to a London controlled by the Templars under Crawford Starrick, and set out to take the city back: building their street gang, the Rooks, across an open world of seven Victorian boroughs. Jacob works through Starrick's lieutenants while Evie hunts a Piece of Eden, the Shroud, from St Paul's to the Tower to a vault under Buckingham Palace.
This route follows both threads across the capital, then jumps forward: to Whitechapel in 1888, where Evie hunts Jack the Ripper in the expansion, and to Tower Bridge in 1916, where Jacob's granddaughter Lydia clears a German spy nest at Churchill's request. Every stop is a real building or district you can walk to.
Vice City is Miami with the labels peeled off. The 2002 game, set in 1986, follows gangster Tommy Vercetti's rise to power after prison, from an ambushed drug deal to the takeover of a drug lord's mansion. The developers built the world from extensive field research in Miami, and the plot draws on the city's real Cubans, Haitians and biker gangs.
This route pins six real places behind the fiction: the port of the opening ambush, the Ocean Drive strip behind Ocean Beach, Little Havana and Little Haiti with their warring gangs, Downtown's biker ground, and the private island behind the Starfish Island mansion. Every pin marks the real stand-in, and each stop names the game location it doubles for. One caveat: Vice City itself is fictional, so expect the flavour of 1980s Miami rather than a street-by-street copy.
The second season of The White Lotus moves to a luxury resort in Sicily, following the staff and wealthy guests through a week of sightseeing days, villa parties and opera nights. Guests explore Taormina's Greek theatre, Daphne drags Harper down to Baroque Noto, and Tanya falls in with a wealthy Brit whose Palermo villa hides an ugly twist.
This route visits the real filming locations in episode order, from the San Domenico Palace hotel to the island beach of the finale. The show swaps two villas across the island: its Noto palace is really Villa Tasca outside Palermo, and Quentin's Palermo villa is Villa Elena near Noto.
A famous American actress walks into a Notting Hill travel bookshop, and its shy owner falls for her: that is the whole of Notting Hill, and somehow it is enough. Hugh Grant stammers, Julia Roberts glows, and London plays itself, from the market street of Portobello Road to a midnight garden and a press conference at the Savoy.
The route follows the film in story order, from the bookshop at 142 Portobello Road and the blue door at 280 Westbourne Park Road to the Ritz, a birthday party, the private garden, the Henry James set at Kenwood House and the Savoy finale. The flat interiors were studio sets and the garden is private, so some pins are for looking rather than entering.
Sophie is about to marry on Kalokairi, a fictional Greek island, and has secretly invited three men to the wedding — any of them could be her real father. Her mother Donna owns the hotel Villa Donna, and the paternity question follows everyone down the aisle.
Five stops on the real islands behind Kalokairi, where principal photography took place from August to September 2007: the town below the villa's hill, the Skiathos harbour where two of the men arrive in identical cabs, the cove of the diary reading and the rock jump, the main beach set with its vanished bar and jetty, and the rock-top chapel of the wedding. One caveat: there is no Villa Donna to visit — the hotel was a Pinewood set.
A chance meeting at the Criterion Bar sends an army doctor just back from Afghanistan to a laboratory at St Bartholomew's Hospital, where a stranger grips his hand and observes: "You have been in Afghanistan, I perceive." Within days Dr Watson has moved into 221B Baker Street, the address where many of the stories begin, and off runs the canon: four novels and 56 short stories, all but one set between 1880 and 1914.
This route walks Holmes's London in the order the stories appeared: the Criterion where Watson met Stamford, the hospital of the famous first deduction, the Baker Street rooms that did not exist when Doyle wrote and are now a museum, Scotland Yard's Victorian headquarters on the Embankment, a society church where a bride vanishes, a silent club on Pall Mall, and the Underground station where a body fell from a train roof.
The Dune films are a two-part adaptation of Frank Herbert's 1965 novel. Paul Atreides travels from Caladan to the desert planet Arrakis, the harsh sole source of spice, and finally forces Emperor Shaddam to come to Arrakis with Irulan and his Sardaukar soldiers. Villeneuve filmed it all in real places: the deserts of Jordan and Abu Dhabi, a Norwegian peninsula, a Budapest studio and an Italian tomb.
This route links the five key locations: Stadlandet standing in for Caladan, Wadi Rum and the Liwa Oasis sharing Arrakis, Origo Studios staging Arrakeen and the ornithopters, and the Brion tomb doubling as the imperial court. Part One shot from March to July 2019 in Hungary, Jordan, Norway and the Emirates; Part Two followed from July to December 2022, adding Italy and Namibia to the itinerary.
Tommy sets out for Seattle to hunt Abby, and Ellie and Dina follow him into a ruined city where the WLF militia and a cult, the Seraphites, fight for control. The Last of Us Part II plays the same three days twice: first as Ellie, then as Abby. The city is the real one: Naughty Dog chose Seattle for its hills and varied weather, and its artists travelled there to study the architecture, vegetation and topography.
This route follows both runs. Ellie's: the synagogue they call the Dome, the Pinnacle Theatre, the convention centre and its stalkers, the hospital and the aquarium. Abby's: the stadium she lives in, the Great Wheel of her memories, the Chinatown Gate and the Space Needle seen from the island. Many of the game's buildings carry new names; each stop names the real one behind it.
In 1715 a Welsh pirate kills an Assassin, steals his clothes and his name, and ends up sitting in his place at a meeting of Templars in Havana. That is how Edward Kenway enters the Golden Age of Piracy: he takes a ship, the Jackdaw, builds a pirate brotherhood in Nassau, loses his friends to the gallows and to each other, and spends the rest of the story chasing a device called the Observatory that can watch anyone on earth.
Black Flag sets all of it in real ports — Havana, Nassau, Kingston, Port Royal — and then leaves the Caribbean for the Maya ruins of Tulum, an island in the Gulf of Guinea and a final scene in London. The route follows Edward from the harbour where Torres's plot starts, through the pirate republic and the governor who ends it, to the Kingston house where Mary Read drops the disguise, the jail at Port Royal, Príncipe, where the Sage is waiting, and Covent Garden. Most stops mark a real landmark in the town the game rebuilds.
Assassin's Creed Valhalla brings the Viking Eivor and their clan to Anglo-Saxon England, where Hytham asks for help ridding the land of the Order of the Ancients. Following tip-offs from an informant who signs himself the "Poor Fellow-Soldier of Christ", Eivor hunts Order members from Grantebridge to Jorvik and Wincestre.
The route visits the real places behind the game's: Cambridge, where the jarlskona Soma takes back her town; York, the capital of Viking Britain; the docks of Repton, where the Great Heathen Army wintered; Alfred's Winchester; the battle at Chippenham in 878; and Athelney, where the informant's identity is finally revealed. All six can be visited today.
Jurassic Park (1993) invents a dinosaur theme park on an island that does not exist, then shoots almost all of it on one small Hawaiian island, Kauaʻi. On 11 September 1992, the last scheduled day of the Kauaʻi shoot, Hurricane Iniki passed directly over the island and pushed one famous sequence to a ranch on Oʻahu.
Nine stops follow the film in story order: the garden of the opening attack, the stream that played a Dominican amber mine, the Kapaʻa waterfront that played a Costa Rica café, the falls every visitor flies past, the estate where the visitor centre façade stood, the gates below Mount Waiʻaleʻale, the canyon of the dead fence, the Gallimimus stampede at Kualoa Ranch and the garden where Grant finds the nest. Filming on Kauaʻi began on 24 August 1992.
Liberty City is New York with the labels peeled off. Grand Theft Auto IV rebuilds four of the boroughs, borrows New Jersey for the state across the river, and copies in the Statue of Liberty, the Coney Island Cyclone, the Manhattan Bridge, Times Square and the Empire State Building — then renames nearly all of them, so the game's Liberty statue holds a takeaway coffee instead of a torch. The story is set in 2008, the year the game arrived.
This route pins nine real places behind those names: the triumphal arch at Brooklyn's Grand Army Plaza, the wooden Cyclone at Coney Island, the Manhattan Bridge as the Algonquin Bridge, Brighton Beach as Hove Beach, the surviving 1964 World's Fair site in Queens, and three Manhattan landmarks — Middle Park, Star Junction and the Rotterdam Tower. Each stop names the in-game location it stands in for. One caveat: Rockstar deliberately avoided a precise recreation of New York, so expect the landmarks, not the street plan.
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989) sends Indy from a Boy Scout outing in the Utah desert to the rock-cut façade of Petra, chasing the Holy Grail and his missing father. Three trials guard the cup at the end. The film borrows its scenery from half of Europe, the Middle East and the American West.
Nine stops, most of them still standing: the Arches canyons of the opening, the church façade in Venice's Campo San Barnaba that plays the library, an Eifel castle dressed as Brunwald, a San Francisco building that played Berlin's Tempelhof airport, the Almería beach where Henry brings down a fighter with an umbrella, a Granada station playing Alexandretta, the Tabernas tank chase, the Treasury that fronts the Grail's temple, and the Texas sunset the film ends on. Dates are story time; filming ran from May 1988 to early 1989.
