The Chronicles of Narnia began in C. S. Lewis's Belfast and Oxford, and the films were shot in New Zealand, Slovenia and Queensland. This route runs from the Digory statue at the Holywood Arches to The Kilns, the Eagle and Child pub, Elephant Rocks, Bovec and Cleveland Point.
Three stops follow the author: his birthplace, the Oxford house where he wrote every Narnia book, and the pub where he handed round the proofs of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Three follow the cameras, one for each film. Film sites are marked as the places where scenes were shot, not as Narnia itself.
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince was filmed at London's Millennium Bridge, Lacock Abbey in Wiltshire, Fort William in Scotland, Norway's Rauma Line and the Cliffs of Moher in Ireland.
The route follows the 2009 film's scenes in order, from the bridge collapse that opens it to the sea cave where Harry and Dumbledore hunt a Horcrux. Hogwarts Express shots even left the UK for snow in Norway.
Most spots are real places you can visit; the cave interior itself was computer-generated.
Departures (Okuribito), the 2008 film, was shot around Sakata, Kaminoyama and Tsuruoka in Yamagata, Japan. The story follows a cellist who becomes an encoffinment mortician in his hometown.
The route visits the Concerto café in Kaminoyama, the NK Agent office and Minato-za cinema in Sakata, the Tsuru-no-yu bathhouse in Tsuruoka and Amarume Station. Several buildings have moved or closed since filming.
The true story behind Hachi: A Dog's Tale and Hachikō Monogatari runs from Ōdate, Akita, where the dog was born, to the Hachikō statue at Shibuya Station in Tokyo, Aoyama Cemetery, and a Rhode Island depot that played "Bedridge" in the 2009 film.
The route follows Hachikō, the Akita who kept waiting for his owner Hidesaburō Ueno, a Tokyo Imperial University professor, long after Ueno failed to return on 21 May 1925. It covers the birthplace, the station, the final morning, the grave and the 2009 film's location. Film details differ from the real history in places.
Eat Pray Love, the 2010 film of Elizabeth Gilbert's memoir, was shot around Piazza Navona in Rome, at a pizzeria in Naples, in Pataudi, India, and around Ubud and Padang Padang Beach in Bali.
Julia Roberts plays Liz, who leaves a settled life for a year of travel: in the memoir, four months in Italy eating, three in India praying and the end of the year in Bali. This route follows those three legs through the places where the scenes were filmed. The memoir's ashram is unnamed, so the India stop marks only the town where the film shot it.
Pulp Fiction, Jackie Brown and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood were shot around Los Angeles, from a Hawthorne diner to Musso & Frank on Hollywood Boulevard.
The route follows the three films in release order: the diner and boxing venue of Pulp Fiction, the Del Amo mall and strip joint of Jackie Brown, then Musso & Frank, Larry Edmunds Bookshop, the Bruin Theater and the Simi Valley ranch of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. Several sites are gone or rebuilt, such as the Hawthorne Grill and the original Spahn Ranch, and the pins mark the filming locations.
Rocky is set and largely filmed in Philadelphia: Rocky Balboa's Kensington home, the Italian Market on 9th Street, Pat's King of Steaks, the Art Museum steps and the Spectrum arena in South Philadelphia all appear in the 1976 film.
The route follows the story from the opening fight on 25 November 1975 to the New Year's Day title bout. The Spectrum is gone, and the fight itself was shot in Los Angeles.
Hitchcock's North by Northwest starts at the Plaza Hotel and the United Nations in New York, rolls through Grand Central and Chicago's LaSalle Street Station, and ends on Mount Rushmore. Its crop-duster scene, set in Indiana, was filmed near Wasco, California.
An advertising man is mistaken for a spy who does not exist and has to run across the country. The route follows him stop by stop, from the Oak Room to the Chicago hotel where Hitchcock stayed, and says which scenes were real locations and which were sets or stand-ins.
Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol is set in Budapest, Moscow, Dubai, Mumbai and Seattle, but its stand-ins are Prague's main station and Prague Castle, the Burj Khalifa in Dubai and downtown Vancouver.
This route follows the story from the Budapest station murder to the Kremlin bombing, the Dubai tower and sandstorm, the Mumbai chase and the Seattle finale, and shows where each scene was really shot.
8 Mile was filmed on location in Detroit: the trailer park in Warren, the New Center Stamping Plant, the Penobscot Building and the Shelter.
The route follows Jimmy Smith Jr. from his mother's trailer to the rap battles at the Shelter. It takes in the parking garage inside the old Michigan Theatre, the demolished Chin Tiki club and the empty lot where Cheddar Bob shoots himself. Some sites are gone; the Shelter and the Penobscot still stand.
Bella Swan moves to the rainiest corner of Washington and falls for a vampire. Stephenie Meyer picked the town of Forks by searching for rainy places, and the story then carries Bella and Edward from the Olympic Peninsula to the clock tower of Volterra in Tuscany.
The route follows the first two novels from Forks through La Push and Port Angeles to Volterra, and ends in Montepulciano, the town that played Volterra in the film. The pins mark towns, not buildings.
Avatar's floating Hallelujah Mountains draw on Wulingyuan and Tianzi Mountain in Hunan, and on Huangshan, though the film was made largely on a Los Angeles stage in Playa Vista. Cameron named Huangshan, Hunan netizens insisted on Zhangjiajie, and the only walkable Pandora is at Florida's Animal Kingdom.
Expect inspiration rather than filming locations: the film was made largely on stages, so the Chinese pins are stand-ins and credited influences.
Pedro Almodóvar has shot the majority of his films in Madrid, and Madrid's tourism office lists the exact streets, bars and squares where his scenes happened.
The route follows eight filming spots in order of release, from the El Rastro bar of Labyrinth of Passion in 1982 to the Comendadoras square of Parallel Mothers in 2021, with one detour to Almagro in La Mancha for Volver.
A retired detective with a fear of heights is hired to follow a friend's wife around San Francisco, because her husband fears she is possessed by Carlotta Valdes, a woman who died in 1857. Hitchcock's 1958 thriller was shot on location in San Francisco, at Mission San Juan Bautista, in Big Basin Redwoods State Park, at Cypress Point on 17-Mile Drive and at Paramount Studios in Hollywood.
This route follows the story in film order through nine places: a vanished restaurant, a Nob Hill apartment block, a mission cemetery and an art museum, a fort under the Golden Gate Bridge, a coastal kiss, a mission bell tower and a hotel with a green neon sign.
Twin Peaks is set five miles from the Canadian border, but its exteriors come from the Snoqualmie Valley, all around 25–30 miles from Seattle. David Lynch and Mark Frost found the places they had written into the pilot in Snoqualmie, North Bend and Fall City.
This route follows the series through five of them: the falls from the opening titles, the road with the welcome sign, the hotel, the sheriff's station and the diner. Most interiors were built on sets in a San Fernando Valley warehouse, so these stops are exteriors, and the Reinig Road pin marks the road, not one spot.
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.
Inception filmed the folding bridge sequence on Paris's Bir-Hakeim bridge, used Tangier standing in for Mombasa, and shot in downtown Los Angeles and at Alberta's temporarily closed Fortress Mountain ski resort. Dom Cobb recruits a forger, a chemist and an architecture student to implant an idea and leads them down through layered dreams to an alpine fortress.
This route follows the 2009 shoot across four countries: the Paris bridge that folds, a fictional bistro corner, Tangier standing in for Mombasa, two Los Angeles action sites and the closed Alberta ski resort that became the snow fortress. Two stops look different today: the bistro was a temporary set and the Heim Bridge has been replaced.
Angels & Demons, Ron Howard's 2009 film, is set across Rome: the Pantheon, Santa Maria del Popolo, Piazza Navona and Castel Sant'Angelo. Four cardinals are kidnapped, one dies each hour on the Path of Illumination, and Robert Langdon must stop antimatter from destroying the Vatican at midnight.
This route follows Ron Howard's 2009 film rather than Dan Brown's novel: the Pantheon and Raphael's tomb, the Chigi Chapel in Santa Maria del Popolo, the obelisk in St Peter's Square, Bernini's Ecstasy of Saint Teresa, the Fountain of the Four Rivers, the assassin's lair at Castel Sant'Angelo, and the midnight finale beneath St Peter's. All of it still stands; the caveat is that Rome's diocese refused the crew access to the churches, so several interiors in the film are studio sets.
Kazuma Kiryu's Kamurocho feels like a real Tokyo night out because it nearly is: Sega modelled it on Kabukicho, then did the same with Dotonbori, Shinsekai, Yokohama and the port town of Onomichi. Every district in the series is based on its real location as it looked in the year its game came out, and later games remodel them again.
This route walks the six real stand-ins behind the fiction in the order the games introduced them: Kabukicho's sleepless streets, the theater square, Dotonbori's neon canal, Shinsekai's tower, Onomichi's temple slopes and Yokohama's Isezaki Mall. All six are ordinary public places you can visit today.
The Grand Budapest Hotel's imaginary republic of Zubrowka is built from real Saxony: Görlitz's Art Nouveau department store as the lobby, Hainewalde and Waldenburg castles, Osterstein in Zwickau and Dresden's Zwinger. In Wes Anderson's comedy the concierge M. Gustave and his lobby boy Zero are caught up in a murder, a stolen painting and a war.
This route visits the real buildings: an empty Art Nouveau department store that became the hotel lobby, a shuttered concert hall, two castles that make up Madame D.'s estate, a former prison, the most beautiful dairy shop in the world and Dresden's baroque Zwinger. Zubrowka is fictional; these are the filming locations.
