When the cameras are rolling, a movie set typically buzzes with activity – but what happens when the clapperboard snaps shut for the final time? Around the world there are some amazing spots that once played host to Hollywood, yet post-production these locations have been left to rack and ruin. While some have come back from the brink, others haven’t benefited from their five minutes of fame. Here we take a virtual movie tour around abandoned backdrops from the silver screen. If you plan on visiting any in real life, be sure to check travel advisories before you go.
The seafaring epic Pirates of the Caribbean first came swashbuckling onto movie screens in 2003. More than 15 years later, the franchise is still going strong having grossed more than £3.4 billion ($4.5bn) at the box office. An authentic piece of movie history exists at hotel and restaurant Wallilabou Anchorage on Caribbean island St Vincent’s west coast. The original set was built around the establishment and it still has props from Captain Jack Sparrow’s escape sequence in the first film.
The Hunger Games, an adaption of Suzanne Collins’ young adult novels, tells the story of a society divided into poverty-stricken districts and forced to take part in an annual battle. Henry River Mill Village, a former cotton mill town in North Carolina, serves as District 12, the hometown of the film’s heroine Katniss Everdeen, played by Jennifer Lawrence.
The film crews have long departed and, these days, fans of the franchise can usually join guided tours of the 72-acre site (which was originally built in 1905), taking in the abandoned brick Company Store and the old Mill House. Currently only self-guided tours are available with special measures in place for Covid-19 – see the website for details.
The 2006 horror movie The Hills Have Eyes kept audiences up at night with its tale of a family left stranded in the New Mexico wilderness. The stretch of desert outside the city of Ouarzazate in Morocco doubled for the American West in the film, and the 'Gas Haven' petrol station, where the family first hear of a shortcut from the store’s creepy clerk, still sits sunbaked in the wild.
Gas Haven isn't the only movie location in the area. It was actually the producers of Lawrence of Arabia (1962) who first saw the potential in the desert outside of Ouarzazate. They needed a location to stand in for Western Asia, with consistent weather and a remote position near the Sahara. Morocco's wilderness fitted the bill. But it wasn't until 1983 that these studios officially opened, providing sets for re-enactments of biblical locations, ancient civilisations and brilliant works of fiction alike.
In terms of acreage, Atlas Film Studios is tipped as the largest in the world, attracting filmmakers from around the globe. When a set is finished with, it's simply left behind and the next one built. But the harsh sun and damage from sands mean the buildings deteriorate quickly, giving the whole area an eerie overtone. Pictured here is the set used in French movie Asterix & Obelix: Mission Cleopatra. Guided tours are typically available, but contact the studios in advance to check availability.
Mel Gibson’s The Patriot is set during the American Revolutionary War and was filmed over 100 days across the state of South Carolina. Fans of the film will recognise Cypress Gardens as the Old Spanish Mission Black Swamp Militia's secret island headquarters. This man-made swampland north of Charleston also features in romantic drama The Notebook, the film adaptation of Nicholas Sparks’ 1996 novel, in which Rachel McAdams and Ryan Gosling play lovers separated by the Second World War and class. The gardens are currently open, though some amenities remain out of use.
Today, the proprietor of the land on which the set was built usually allows visitors to wander around. Like many film sets, however, this site wasn’t built to last and is gradually becoming a victim of southeast Iceland’s vicious winter weather, which has caused the wooden structures to moulder. Still, for now, the huddle of buildings are a spectacular site framed against the region's stark landscape.
Full Metal Jacket, Stanley Kubrick’s 1987 wartime film about America’s ill-fated conflict with Vietnam, wasn’t filmed in southeast Asia at all. The film’s iconic battle scenes were actually shot more than 6,000 miles (9,656km) away on London’s Isle of Dogs, where Kubrick and his team transformed decommissioned coal works factory Beckton Gas Works into a Vietnamese city.
In one of cinema’s most nerve-wracking moments, the platoon of American marines are tasked with clearing the city of Viet Cong and snipers. Kubrick had the whole gas works site selectively destroyed for the drama, and also decorated it with latticework and suitable advertising boards to make it a believable Vietnamese cityscape.
Kevin Costner stars as Ray Kinsella, a novice corn farmer turned baseball hero, in Field of Dreams, the 1989 film adaptation of W.P. Kinsella’s 1982 novel Shoeless Joe. The film has become a cult classic and scenes for the movie were shot on farms near Dyersville, Iowa.
The tight shooting schedule didn't allow time for grass to grow on its own, so ground experts who’d worked on two of America’s largest sports stadiums – the Dodger Stadium and the Rose Bowl – were drafted in to realise the perfect set, including painting the turf a vivid green.
Most of the scenes were shot on two farms and, after filming, one owner, Don Lansing, decided to keep the set intact and open up the site to the public. Lansing sold the land to Go The Distance Baseball in 2012 and it remains open to tourists. Visitors can typically wander around the field and tour the Lansing Family Farm House – the site is currently open with some restrictions, so check the website for updates. The attraction is pictured here back in 2014.
Blue Cloud Ranch has served as the setting for countless films and TV shows including Iron Man and American Sniper. It’s also one of the locations used for 2012’s Zero Dark Thirty, a semi-fictional account of the events leading up to the death of Osama bin Laden. Now discover incredible abandoned subway stations from around the world.
Despite being set in the American Old West, many of cinema's great 'spaghetti Westerns' weren’t filmed in the States at all. In fact, the Tabernas desert near the southern Spanish town of Almería served as the set for countless cowboy classics. The genre was made famous by legendary Italian director Sergio Leone whose films include The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, A Fistful of Dollars and For a Few Dollars More, starring chiselled and grizzled actor Clint Eastwood.
Leone discovered the site near Almería in 1964, and he and his team constructed life-sized towns in the middle of the European desert that served as the backdrop for many films. The sets are still in use today and fans of Nickelodeon's Lost in the West and BBC’s Doctor Who might recognise the location.
Also situated in the province, Oasys MiniHollywood is a filming location, Wild West theme park and occasionally a Western-themed wedding venue. The site is a zoological reserve with a large number of species in serious danger of extinction too.
The mountains and valleys of New Zealand serve as the backdrop for much of Sir Peter Jackson's epic series. In 1998, Jackson’s team of location scouts were searching for the rolling hills and green pastures of Hobbiton, and an aerial search meant they happened upon the Alexander farm, a 1,250-acre sheep farm in lush Waikato.
A life-sized 'shire', the hometown of the novel’s Hobbit heroes, was created especially for the movies and located in the northern part of the North Island. Today the site is a fully-fledged tourist attraction – the Hobbiton Movie Set – and visitors can typically take tours that sweep past sights like Hobbit Holes and the Green Dragon Inn. The set is currently open to the public with procedures and restrictions in place.
Not many people know that the late, great comedian and actor Robin Williams, star of films including Good Will Hunting, Mrs. Doubtfire and Dead Poets Society, also played the eponymous character in the 1980 film adaption of the Popeye comics. The rugged Mediterranean island of Malta serves as the principal location for the spinach-guzzling anti-hero's escapades.
When the life-sized town constructed in Anchor Bay, in the northwest of the island, was abandoned after filming, the Maltese government decided to revive it as Popeye Village, a family-friendly theme park and now one of the island’s most popular attractions. Read on as we reveal the eeriest ghost towns in America.
George Lucas’ intergalactic saga Star Wars was a defining moment in the history of cinema and has spawned countless other films set in galaxies far, far away. Desert planet Tatooine plays a major role throughout the franchise as the home of Anakin Skywalker, the young Jedi who grows up to become super villain Darth Vader. And the fictional name is a clue to its real-life location...
Tatooine is named after Tataouine, a city in southern Tunisia. The city features most predominantly in the first of the prequels, 1999’s Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace, and is a popular attraction to this day, due to the unique cave architecture of its Berber population.
Fans of the franchise might also recognise Hotel Sidi Idriss, around two hours north of Tataouine, which served as the Lars homestead location. This unique accommodation features in A New Hope (the first film in the franchise) and returns in Attack of the Clones.
Part of the Marvel franchise, Iron Man first hit screens in 2008 and actor Robert Downey Jr. won hearts with his performance of the eponymous anti-hero. The landscapes of Kunar Province, Afghanistan, where Iron Man's alter ego Tony Stark is captured after a raid on the army convoy, were actually shot in Alabama Hills at Lone Pine, California.
In Iron Man 2, Stark Industry’s airfield is Edwards Air Force Base, about 30 miles (48km) northeast of Lancaster in the Mojave Desert, California. The base is a screen regular, having appeared in The Right Stuff, Armageddon and the Transformers movies.
Actors Jack Black and Michael Cera buddy up in 2009’s Year One, a tongue-in-cheek comedy about a pair of early hunter-gatherers. Parts of the movie were filmed near the town of Sibley in northwest Louisiana, where the biblical city of Sodom was brought to life (as pictured). It's a gloriously wild location, with the set itself surrounded by sand and hemmed in with trees.
Martin Scorsese's 2002 epic Gangs of New York is set in mid-19th-century New York's slums and stars Leonardo DiCaprio, Daniel Day-Lewis and Cameron Diaz. The characters are caught up in a long-standing Catholic-Protestant feud on the street of Five Points, Manhattan, but the movie set was a long way from the Big Apple. The film was actually shot in Rome, Italy at the famous Cinecittà (Cinema City), still the largest film studio in Europe and the heart of Italian cinema to this day.
Production designer Dante Ferretti went all out when recreating this swathe of mid-19th-century New York. His masterpiece spread out over an entire mile and comprised an area of Lower Manhattan, complete with a pocket of the East River waterfront and two full-sized sailing ships.
Acclaimed director Tim Burton’s Big Fish (2003) is the tear-jerking story of a son’s reconciliation with his dying father. Burton and his team had the fictional town of Spectre constructed from scratch rather than use a real-world location as the set. The town was built on Jackson Lake Island, along the banks of the Alabama River near the town of Montgomery, and still stands today.
Tourists can typically walk in the footsteps of the film's blockbuster names (which include Ewan McGregor, Marion Cotillard and Helena Bonham Carter) on the now deserted and somewhat eerie set, which today is overgrown with wildlife. Check the Jackson Lake Island Facebook page for updates. Love this? Now check out the world's most remote hotels.