Tristan Hotham

Researcher of campaigns and platforms. Maker of other things.

Where every film was shot: film cities, foreign productions and James Bond on one map

Title card reading 'Where every film was shot' in black, red and teal on cream, beside a world map of small hexagons shaded yellow to dark purple, densest in the United States and western Europe. Text: 23,468 films and 7,926 filming locations in Wikidata, from Los Angeles to Pinewood, plus every Bond location.

Wikidata knows where 23,468 films were shot. I put every one of those filming locations on a map to find the world’s film cities, the countries that play host to other countries’ films, and every place James Bond has been, and to see how much of the picture is simply missing.

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Films are rarely made where they say they are. A Western might be shot in Spain, a New York thriller in Toronto, a desert epic in Morocco. Wikidata, the open database behind Wikipedia, records a filming location with map coordinates for 23,468 films, at 7,926 places: studios, streets, beaches, castles, whole cities and sometimes whole countries.

That last part matters. 20% of the film-location records just say a country, and another 14% a state or region. Put those on a map and you get fake hotspots in the middle of Indonesia or California. So I sorted every location into country, region, city or town, and site, and only mapped the last two. The countries still count when I ask who films where.

World map with small hexagons shaded from pale yellow to dark purple by the number of film-location records. The darkest clusters are Los Angeles, New York, London, Paris and Rome; western Europe and the eastern United States are densely covered, India, Japan, eastern China and south east Brazil have scattered clusters, and Africa and central Asia are almost empty
Filming locations in Wikidata, cities, towns and sites only. Darker hexagons hold more film-location records.

The film cities

I grouped each location with the nearest big city within 32 km, so Pinewood Studios counts for London and Santa Monica for Los Angeles. Four places stand out: Los Angeles with 1,514 films, New York with 1,350, London with 1,118 and Paris with 933. Vancouver is a distant fifth with 452. Pinewood alone is listed for 645 films, more than any other single site.

Horizontal bar chart of the twenty cities with most films: Los Angeles 1,514, New York City 1,350, London 1,118, Paris 933, then Vancouver, Montreal, Hong Kong, Toronto, Rome and Madrid with roughly 290 to 450 each, and gold numbers on the right giving each city's rank when films are weighted by popularity
The busiest filming cities in Wikidata, with each city’s rank when films are weighted by popularity.

Weighting each film by its number of Wikipedia articles and other Wikimedia pages (sitelinks, a rough measure of fame) reshuffles the list lower down. Long Beach jumps from 23rd to 9th, and Ooty, a hill town in Tamil Nadu with 199 mostly Indian films, falls to 44th. That says less about the films than about whose films Wikipedia writes about.

Who films in whose country

Wikidata also records each film’s countries of origin. If a location is outside all of them, the film was shot abroad there. By that measure 19% of films were shot at least partly abroad. Canada hosts by far the most foreign productions, 717, and 95% of them are American. The United States, the United Kingdom, France and Spain follow. In smaller places, foreign films are most of what gets shot: 96% in Malta, 82% in Morocco, 79% in Bulgaria and 78% in Iceland.

Two bar charts. Left: foreign productions hosted by country, Canada far ahead with 717, then the United States 292, the United Kingdom 287, France 253, Spain 252 and Mexico 182. Right: share of films shot in each country that are foreign, led by Malta and the Bahamas at 96 percent, Kenya, Thailand, the Philippines, Morocco, Egypt, Bulgaria and Iceland all above three quarters
Left: countries hosting the most foreign productions. Right: where foreign films are the majority of all recorded filming.

The share of films shot abroad has crept up, from 20% in the 1950s to 25% in the 2000s (leaving out Indonesian films, which almost all list only “Indonesia”). The bigger change is where films go. Spain’s foreign productions peak in the 1960s, the era of European co-productions and westerns shot around Almería. Canada’s peak in the 2000s, Bulgaria’s too, and Hungary’s and Iceland’s in the 2010s.

Two line charts. Left: share of films shot at least partly abroad by decade, rising from about 11 to 15 percent before the 1950s to about 20 percent from the 1950s and 24 to 25 percent since 2000, with American films higher. Right: foreign films hosted per decade by Canada, the United Kingdom, Spain, Bulgaria, Hungary and Morocco; Canada climbs steeply to a peak of 266 in the 2000s, Spain peaks early in the 1960s
Left: films shot at least partly abroad, by decade. Right: foreign productions hosted by six countries, by decade.

Stand-ins

Some cities are filmed mostly by outsiders. In Valletta and the rest of Malta 96% of the films are foreign; in Budapest 66%, Vancouver 63% and Toronto 56%, mostly American. These are the famous stand-ins, cities that play somewhere else. I have to be careful here, though: Wikidata’s filming locations do not say what a place stood in for, so the data show who comes to film, not what they pretended it was.

Horizontal bar chart of cities where foreign productions are the largest share of films: Valletta in Malta at 96 percent, Bangkok 85 percent, Budapest 66 percent, Hamilton and Vancouver in Canada about 65 and 63 percent, then Geneva, Dublin, Toronto, Como and Amsterdam, each labelled with their two commonest origins
Filming cities where foreign productions are most common.

The Bond films before 1990 have 6.6 recorded locations each. Those since 2006 have 19.6.

Following Bond

Bond was the first thing I wanted to look up. The 25 official Eon films, from Dr. No in 1962 to No Time to Die in 2021, have 248 recorded filming locations, 179 distinct places in 36 countries and territories. Pinewood is listed for 22 of them. After the UK come the United States (10 films) and then Switzerland, Italy and the Bahamas (6 each).

World map with countries shaded gold by how many Bond films list a location there, darkest for the United Kingdom and United States, and dots for filming places coloured from teal for the 1960s to dark red for the 2020s, clustered in Britain, the Alps, Italy, Spain and the Caribbean, with outliers in Japan, China, Thailand, Brazil, Chile and Azerbaijan
Filming locations of the 25 Eon James Bond films in Wikidata.

Bond is also the best illustration of the data’s biggest weakness. Spectre has 33 locations in Wikidata; Licence to Kill has 2. The early films did not travel less (Goldfinger went to Switzerland, Kentucky and Miami), they are just written down in less detail.

What the map leaves out

This is a map of documented filming. 40% of the films are American. India, which makes more films each year than any other country, has 614; Nigeria has 13. Popular films are described in far more detail: films with fewer than five sitelinks average 1.3 recorded locations, films with 50 or more average 3.6, and they are four times as likely to be shot abroad. Some of that is real; some is just attention.

Three small charts. Left: film-location records by what the location is, 37 percent cities and towns, 29 percent sites, 20 percent whole countries and 14 percent states or regions. Middle: films by country of origin, the United States 40 percent, Indonesia 13 percent, France 11 percent, the United Kingdom 8 percent. Right: share shot abroad rising with popularity from 10 percent for the least known films to 44 percent for the best known
How precise the locations are, where the films come from, and how popularity affects what is recorded.

How I did this

One query to Wikidata, through QLever, returned every film with a filming location that has coordinates, with its release dates, countries of origin and sitelinks, and each location’s country. The 119,808 rows boil down to 23,468 films and 7,926 locations. Each location is classed as a country, a region, a city or town (matched to Natural Earth’s populated places) or a site; only cities, towns and sites go on the map, and each is grouped with the nearest big city for the rankings. A film counts as shot abroad wherever a location falls outside all its countries of origin, with co-productions at home in every partner country. The Bond films are a hand list of the 25 Eon films. The paper sets out every step and caveat.

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Data and code

Notes and sources

  • Wikidata, via QLever. CC0.
  • Natural Earth countries, states and provinces, and populated places (public domain).
  • The Eon James Bond films follow the official list of 25 films from 1962 to 2021; the 1967 Casino Royale is not an Eon film and is left out.
  • I wrote the text, with drafting and editing assistance from Claude (Anthropic), which also helped prepare the analysis code. I reviewed and checked all text and results.

Tristan Hotham

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