Ever notice bad location doubling in films?

[shaneo632]

Ever watched a movie that's supposed to be set in one location but is clearly another? I remember seeing Bloodshot a few weeks ago and a scene in "London" was very clearly filmed in South Africa.

Also I just watched Ip Man 4 and most of the "California" scenes were shot in Preston, England, which I noticed immediately and couldn't stop laughing at:

It was so distracting, especially as most of the cast are clearly English actors pretending to be American, and they just slapped a yellow filter on the screen to try and make it seem a bit more like Cali.

Another example I remember from the TV side is Marvel's Iron Fist, where they go to China I believe, but it was clearly just filmed in the US.

 

[Liquidsnake]

Oooh I am going to like this thread!!!!

 

[UnluckyKate]

Every movie ever, shot in Toronto or Atlanta, pretending to be any other city in the world.

 

[NealMcCauley]

To be serious Mann's Last of the Mohicans, shot in western North Carolina, has vegetation that doesn't grow in the area the movie is supposed to be set in (upstate New York IIRC).

 

[Keldroc]

A whole lot of places in the first five seasons of The X-Files look exactly like Vancouver and its surrounding areas.

 

[MegaManTrigger]

Suits is the worst at this.

Imagine thinking this is New York City:

Especially when you see Old City Hall, a TTC bus, and Toronto street signs.

 

[hordak]

everything that is suppose to be in San Francisco but is really just Toronto with the Transamerica Pyramid or Golden Gate bridge added to the skyline.

Also anything filmed on the Golden Gate bridge is not really

 

[Curler]

Anywhere filmed in Vancouver. It's easily recognizable when you see locations like Lion's Gate Bridge, that have those x's on the traffic lights for flow. Or if you see Canadian brands like "Scotiabank". Yeah that's not SF/wherever you are.

 

[wandering]

relevant:

 

[LakeEarth]

Wasn't Homeland kinda racist about this, like modern middle Eastern cities being portrait as desert shanty towns?

 

[El_TigroX]

I think only New Yorkers can pick out Toronto from a brief clip. It's our latent super power.

 

[Brian McDoogle]

To be serious Mann's Last of the Mohicans, shot in western North Carolina, has vegetation that doesn't grow in the area the movie is supposed to be set in (upstate New York IIRC).

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The last Sophia Coppola movie who's name now escapes me had similar problems.

 

[Lump]

 

[Balphon]

In the Tommy Westphall Universe, all cities just happen to look like Vancouver.

 

[chalkitdown]

That terrible Mark Wahlberg movie Mile 22 is supposed to be set somewhere in Southeast Asia but is clearly Bogota, Colombia. Could tell straight away as I used to live there.

The Matrix is one that stands out to me as well. Sydney stands in for some random American city. Doesn't help that most of the supporting cast are Australians putting on American accents.

 

[Teenage Fansub]

In Guns Akimbo, seeing Auckland NZ stand in for New York (maybe it's not explicitly NY, but major American city anyway) was crazy.
They use one street with a skywalk like four times in the movie for different locations, and I could instantly tell one of the car chases was 100% CG cause there's no possible way they could have shot it where they did.

The recent Black Christmas remake had Dunedin NZ stand in for a random US college town. I haven't seen the movie, but the first thing you see in the trailer is the city's landmark University.

 

[konka]

Not a film but anyone who has ever been in Pennsylvania can clearly see the The Office is not taking place in Pennsylvania.

 

[Deleted member 17388]

Wasn't Homeland kinda racist about this, like modern middle Eastern cities being portrait as desert shanty towns?

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That's like every Hollywood movie.

*Thrown in yellow tinted lenses* Presto! A foreign third-world country.
Bonus point if they add masked gun shooters.

 

[skeezx]

only when a scene takes place in metropolitan Texas and it's a BBQ joint or square dance hall-type "club" (speaking as a native texan)

but i'm usually kind of lenient on this stuff

 

[Griselbrand]

The Nolan Batman trilogy was awful at this, but especially so in Dark Knight Rises.

 

[PanzerKraken]

The Nolan Batman trilogy was awful at this, but especially so in Dark Knight Rises.

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Well Gotham is fictional, but of course biggest problem was that it looked like a different city in each movie

 

[PJV3]

I have a feeling that Adam west's batman didn't come to the UK to film the stuff in Londinium.

 

[softtack]

Jackie Chan's Who Am I

The car chase begins in South Africa and ends in The Netherlands, lmao.

 

[BossAttack]

Budapest portraying future LA in BR2049. I fucking love the film, but not even the future setting can hide a clearly Eastern European city trying to be West Coast America.

LA standing in for Miami for 90% of most TV shows that's supposed to be Miami, looking hard at you Dexter.

Vancouver standing in for every place on the planet for every CW show. We're in Afghanistan, we're in the Old West, we're in Eastern Europe, we're in San Francisco. Geez GOD, NO! You look nothing like any of those places. It cracks me up everytime. Just take the same Vancouver places, slap a color filter on it and then call it Turkmenistan.

 

[Realyst]

Rumble in the Bronx was sooooo bad at hiding that it was shot in Vancouver. I mean, there's a scene in which a hovercraft drives on a beach and I'm just like, who are the producers trying to fool?

 

[Viewt]

Well Gotham is fictional, but of course biggest problem was that it looked like a different city in each movie

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Totally. Batman Begins is a weird Chicago/New York/Tomorrowland hybrid, Dark Knights is blatantly just Chicago, and then Rises is nakedly Manhattan. The whole isolation plot of Rises doesn't work in Dark Knight's Gotham.

 

[IDreamOfHime]

Glasgow doubling for Philadelphia in World War Z. They didn't even try to hide it because they filmed at one of the most popular and touristy area if Glasgow.

The Matrix is one that stands out to me as well. Sydney stands in for some random American city. Doesn't help that most of the supporting cast are Australians putting on American accents.

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I give this one a pass because there is only one city within the Matrix; Mega City. They're not pretending to be a different real city like the other examples.

 

[chalkitdown]

LA standing in for Miami for 90% of most TV shows that's supposed to be Miami, looking hard at you Dexter.

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This one is even more jarring when it actually WAS filmed on location in Miami for a lot of season 1. The difference between the two locations is very obvious.

 

[jelly]

There is a set of stairs in Canada somewhere that I've seen in loads of tv shows.

 

[Ultima_5]

Rumble in the Bronx was sooooo bad at hiding that it was shot in Vancouver. I mean, there's a scene in which a hovercraft drives on a beach and I'm just like, who are the producers trying to fool?

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yup this was mine

 

[Älg]

everything that is suppose to be in San Francisco but is really just Toronto with the Transamerica Pyramid or Golden Gate bridge added to the skyline.

Also anything filmed on the Golden Gate bridge is not really

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bro are you telling me that godzilla did not in fact destroy the golden gate bridge

 

[kai3345]

Leftovers Season 2 was both shot & set in and around Austin, TX. But in early episodes there are flashbacks to scenes that are supposed to be set in New York and I feel like they didn't even try lmao. This shot from episode 2 is the most egregious. On the left is a fairly famous bowling alley in Austin, and on the right is the actual state of texas carved into the side of the highway lol.

 

[mbpm]

All of Stargate SG1's forest planets feel like this

 

[UltraMagnanimous]

Superman IV & Milton Keynes.

Beset bit here is the random fire hydrant:

 

[Jeff Albertson]

Recently watched Kingsmen for the first time.

The famous church scene, the exterior was so obviously suburban England that I had to pause and check if I had missed something

 

[Solo]

Well, I mean its bound to happen with Atlanta, Toronto and Vancouver seemingly making up 90% of location shooting.

 

[thermopyle]

I live in DTLA and all the filming doubling as NYC or some other east coast downtown got me scratching my head. I guess it's fine if you're unfamiliar with how they actually look like.

 

[Lulu]

Suits is the worst at this.

Imagine thinking this is New York City:

Especially when you see Old City Hall, a TTC bus, and Toronto street signs.

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Rumble in the Bronx is the worst. This could pass for close to grand Central

 

[chuckddd]

I can't remember the show, but I remember they were kind of traveling across America and had an action sequence in a super long tunnel in Albuquerque. I laughed until I cried and then turned it off and never went back.

 

[Prinz Eugn]

Having lived in Albuquerque, seeing Breaking Bad was cool, but seeing Yellow Albuquerque as Mexico was hilarious.

 

[7aged]

Nothing can ever beat the Jamie fox film "the kingdom" where they had a silhouette of the kingdom tower crudely photoshopped into the skyline to indicate it's in Riyadh

 

[winjet81]

This one is even more jarring when it actually WAS filmed on location in Miami for a lot of season 1. The difference between the two locations is very obvious.

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I always get a kick out of seeing the sunset/sunrise discrepancies for east coast/west coast switches.

It happens in movies all the time.

 

[steejee]

All of Stargate SG1's forest planets feel like this

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Well they at least lampooned themselves on that at one point. Hard to fault them much, not a high budget show.

Very specific one: Social Network Harvard scenes. No filming allowed on campus so instead they did campus shots at Johns Hopkins. Similar architecture but if you've been to either it's obvious and they don't try to hide it (lived across from bar used in opening scene, walked through Harvard campus many times, JHU alumni)

 

[lokiduck]

Yes, as someone who lives in Washington near Seattle which is notorious for studios refusing to film here because Seattle charges too much, I am very aware of when they do bad location doubling for Seattle in films.

I even joke that the destroyed Seattle in Pacific Rim (How the fuck did the Kaiju get there? Did it swim down the Puget Sound/fly over the Olympics?) was just destroyed Vancouver.

Basically anytime a show claims to be Seattle I just sigh and go, "no that is clearly not Seattle's Pier stop even fucking trying"

HOWEVER, my favorite Seattle Fuck up is this one.

This view from Grey's apartment is impossible because it'd mean his building would have to be in the Sound.

For reference here is the normal Seattle Skyline from the water.

 

[Deleted member 18407]

The only time I've noticed this stuff is when I was watching the first season of Fargo while I lived in Fargo. That episode set in Fargo does not look like the city at all.

 

[Ottaro]

Dallas as Detroit in Robocop.
Dallasites LOVE this film because there is so much Dallas iconography throughout. We love being a stand-in here.

OCP HQ is Dallas city hall with the stretch tool used on it.

Fictional Detroit city hall is an old Dallas city hall building.

Fountain Place in the window!

And many more:
https://www.dallasfilmcommission.co...ing_wp_cron=1495048802.3828508853912353515625

There's even a scene of Robocop driving towards a matte painting of future Detroit, but there's a local news/radio tower for WFAA in front of it, and the bridge he's driving on is distinctly one of Dallas's viaducts. The movie absolutely oozes Dallas to everyone who lives here.

 

[Z-Beat]

Just use the real roof next time, Tommy

 

[maigret]

Totally. Batman Begins is a weird Chicago/New York/Tomorrowland hybrid, Dark Knights is blatantly just Chicago, and then Rises is nakedly Manhattan. The whole isolation plot of Rises doesn't work in Dark Knight's Gotham.

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It's also Pittsburgh for some of the movie (stadium scene).

 

[adamsappel]

I only watched a couple of episodes (need to get back to it!), but doesn't Orphan Black supposedly take place in the US? And yet the currency is huge and pink & purple.

 

[TheBryanJZX90]

Ya LA is not Tokyo but Tokyo Drift sure wants you to think it is