Napoleon Dynamite is set and was filmed in Preston, Idaho, from Preston High School and the Deseret Industries thrift shop to a chicken farm in Franklin and Lamont Reservoir.
Director Jared Hess shot his 2004 comedy in July 2003 in the town where he grew up. This route follows Napoleon, Kip and Uncle Rico through six places, from the school gym to the wedding. Some scenes were shot elsewhere in Idaho, and the guide gives only street-level addresses for a few spots.
The Mabinogion, Wales's medieval collection of myths, is set across Narberth in Pembrokeshire, Harlech, Tomen y Mur, Segontium and Dinas Emrys in Gwynedd. Its tales of Rhiannon, Branwen, Lleu and two fighting dragons have all been tied to real hills, forts and castles.
This route follows three of the Four Branches and two native tales, from Pembrokeshire to Gwynedd. Several identifications are traditional rather than proven, and each stop says so.
The Battle of Kulikovo, fought on 8 September 1380 at Kulikovo Field near the Don, made Grand Prince Dmitry of Moscow famous as Donskoy, "of the Don". The route follows him from Trinity Lavra and Kolomna to the battlefield, Old Simonov and the Moscow Kremlin.
It covers the muster against Mamai's army, the crossing in fog, the ambush regiment, the burial of the fallen and Moscow's burning in 1382. Battlefield pins are approximate because sources give no exact spot.
Jaws was filmed on Martha's Vineyard, which stood in for Amity Island: Edgartown, State Beach and the Jaws Bridge.
Steven Spielberg began shooting there on 2 May 1974, using the island's whaling town, its barrier beaches and the little Chappaquiddick ferry as the summer resort the shark terrorises. This route follows the film from the opening bonfire at South Beach to the last shot off Cape Poge Light. In between are Brody's beach-closing signs at Water and Main, the Kintner attack at Joseph Sylvia State Beach, the shark's run under the American Legion Memorial Bridge into Sengekontacket Pond, Quint's vanished workshop at Menemsha and the open water between Oak Bluffs and East Chop where the Orca hunts.
Test Drive Unlimited sent players around Oʻahu's 1,000 miles of roads in 2006; The Crew Motorfest returned to a scaled-down island in 2023, with a car-culture festival at its centre. Both treat the island as a stage, one for a free-roam lifestyle racer and the other for a themed racing playground.
This route follows a road-trip loop from Honolulu Airport through Waikiki, Diamond Head, Hanauma Bay and the North Shore to Haleʻiwa, then back south to Pearl Harbor. Pins mark the real places; the games shrink the island and invent some of the roads in between.
The Secret Life of Walter Mitty goes from the Time-Life Building in New York to Iceland, where Stykkishólmur doubles for Greenland, Seyðisfjörður hosts the longboard descent and Skógafoss stands in for the Himalayas. Ben Stiller's 2013 film follows a photo editor chasing a missing negative.
This route starts at Life's real Manhattan home and then follows Walter through the Icelandic towns, harbour, mountain road, volcano and waterfall that stand in for Greenland and Afghanistan. The places are real; which country they play is not.
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.
Batman Begins was filmed on Iceland's Vatnajökull glacier, at Mentmore Towers and Cardington in England, and on the streets of Chicago, including Lower Wacker Drive and the Franklin Street Bridge. Gotham City is a patchwork of real places.
This route follows the story from the League of Shadows in "Bhutan" to Wayne Manor, the Tumbler chase and the Narrows, with the real site behind each scene.
The Shawshank Redemption was filmed mostly in Ohio: Shawshank State Prison is the Ohio State Reformatory in Mansfield, the opening trial is the Wyandot County Courthouse in Upper Sandusky, and the final beach is on Saint Croix.
The route follows Andy Dufresne from his trial to the Mansfield prison, the woodshop where Red hears Figaro, Brooks's halfway house and the Caribbean beach that stands in for Zihuatanejo.
Quigley Down Under is set in Fremantle, Western Australia, but it was filmed in the Northern Territory and Victoria: Alice Springs, Apollo Bay and Warrnambool.
This route follows the sharpshooter from the dock to the Outback ranch, the desert and the coastal town to the final wharf. Warrnambool played Fremantle, so the Western Australia stop marks only the real port the story names.
Hitchcock's The Birds is set in Bodega Bay, California, and filmed there too: the harbor, the Tides Wharf restaurant and the schoolhouse in nearby Bodega are all real places you can find on the map.
The route starts in San Francisco's Union Square, follows Melanie Daniels across the bay to the Brenner farm, and ends with the crows at the schoolhouse and the diner siege. Some Bodega Bay scenes were shot on a studio set, so the pins mark the real places the film borrowed.
The English Patient was filmed in Tunisia and Italy: desert scenes near Tozeur, Nefta and Chott el Djerid, and the wartime monastery at Sant'Anna in Camprena near Pienza in Tuscany.
Contains story spoilers. The route follows the film's Italian settings, then its desert story: Hana's frescoes at Arezzo, a Venice hotel standing in for Cairo, the Cave of Swimmers and Almásy's camp. Some desert sites need a guided trip.
Good Will Hunting is set in Boston and was shot in South Boston, at MIT and Harvard in Cambridge, and at Bunker Hill Community College. Will, a janitor and self-taught genius, moves between a dive bar and the lecture halls of two famous campuses.
The route follows five places from the film, from the blackboard at MIT and the L Street Tavern to Harvard Square and the college where Sean Maguire teaches.
Catherine the Great was born in Stettin (now Szczecin, Poland), crowned in the Moscow Kremlin and lived at Oranienbaum, the Winter Palace and Tsarskoye Selo near Saint Petersburg.
The route follows the German princess from her birth in 1729 through the 1762 coup and her coronation to her English garden and the Bronze Horseman statue she commissioned. Birthplace sources differ, so the first pin is approximate.
Dawn of the Dead (1978) was filmed at Monroeville Mall, east of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, with other scenes shot at a downtown Pittsburgh dock, a Monroeville airfield and a truck yard in Irwin.
George A. Romero's zombie film is set in Philadelphia and a mall, but it was made in the Pittsburgh area. This route follows the survivors from the police dock to the mall, with the real places that stood in for each scene. Several of those places have changed or disappeared.
The Loch Ness Monster, or Nessie, is reported around Loch Ness in the Scottish Highlands, from the River Ness and Foyers to Urquhart Castle.
The route follows the legend from Saint Columba's water beast in AD 565 through the sightings of 1888 and 1933, the 1934 "surgeon's photograph" later shown to be a hoax, and the 1977 photo taken beside Urquhart Castle. The stories are claims and legends, not proven facts.
The Via Francigena is the medieval pilgrim road from Canterbury Cathedral through France and Switzerland to St Peter's in Rome, recorded by Archbishop Sigeric around 990. This route follows it from Canterbury over the Great St Bernard Pass to Lucca, Siena and Viterbo.
Sigeric's return trip ran to 80 stages of about 20 km each, some 1,700 km in all. Pilgrims still walk it today. Stops are landmarks on the route, not proven overnight stays.
Jack the Ripper's Whitechapel murders of 1888 happened along a few Whitechapel and Spitalfields streets: Durward Street (then Buck's Row), Hanbury Street, Berner Street, Mitre Square and Miller's Court in Spitalfields. Five killings are generally attributed to the unidentified murderer.
This route follows the canonical victims in date order, with the Goulston Street graffito and the Ten Bells pub. Some sites are gone or renamed, and Miller's Court has no pin.
The Trail of Tears was the forced removal of the Cherokee from their homeland in the southeastern United States to present-day Oklahoma. This route follows it from the capital at New Echota, Georgia, through Red Clay, Fort Cass and Blythe Ferry in Tennessee to Fort Gibson.
Each stop ties to a documented moment: a treaty signed by a minority, a council that rejected it, the camps of summer 1838, a river crossing and the arrival in Indian Territory. Some sites are memorials today and others are only markers; the Fort Cass and Fort Gibson pins are approximate.
Look Back is set around the hometown of manga artist Tatsuki Fujimoto, Nikaho in Akita Prefecture, and the live-action film of 2026 was shot mainly there, from the cherry-tree lane at Kunpuen to Nikaho Station. The story follows Fujino and Kyomoto, two girls who draw manga together. It became an anime film in June 2024.
The route follows the story from Fujino's childhood walks in Nikaho and the bookshop in Hirasawa, to the rebuilt bedroom sets at the station and the Smile centre, and on to the art university in Yamagata where the story turns.
Seven Samurai was filmed at Toho Studios in Tokyo and in Shizuoka and Hakone, because no single location could cover the whole area.
Kurosawa's 1954 film has one mountain village, but it was stitched together from different places: studio rice fields in Setagaya, a valley above the Tanna Tunnel, a mill site in Izu, a waterfall in Shizuoka and a mountain pass in Hakone.
The stops are approximate because the screen village never existed as one place.
Hiroo Onoda, the Japanese soldier who kept fighting on Lubang Island in the Philippines until 1974, is traced here from the Nakano School in Tokyo to Lubang's mountains and Manila's Malacañang Palace.
Sent to Lubang on 26 December 1944 with orders never to surrender, Onoda stayed in hiding for 28 years, 6 months and 8 days after Japan's surrender. The route follows his training, his years in the hills, his surrender in March 1974 and a disputed return visit in 1996. Several locations are approximate, and accounts of the violence on the island are contested.
Amachan, the 2013 NHK morning drama, is set in Kitasanriku, a fictional town modelled on Kuji, Iwate; this route visits Kuji Station, Kosode Coast and railway stations along the Sanriku Coast.
Aki, a shy Tokyo girl, becomes a sea-urchin diver and a local idol in a small seaside town. This route follows the hometown chapter through five real places: Kuji Station, Kosode Coast, Horinai Station, Tanohata Station and Taneichi High School. Several stand in for places the drama names differently.
Hashima, nicknamed Gunkanjima or Battleship Island, lies about 15 km off Nagasaki, and its coal mine grew from the same story as Glover Garden, the Kosuge Slip Dock and the Takashima mine.
The route follows Nagasaki's industrial rise from 1859: the Scottish merchant Thomas Blake Glover, Japan's first western-style dock, a pioneering coal shaft, the Mitsubishi shipyard and finally Hashima, packed with 5,259 people in 1959 and empty after 1974. It also records the wartime forced labour of Korean civilians and Chinese prisoners of war on Hashima.
