Changelog

What has changed on this atlas, newest first, including the things that turned out to be wrong. If you found one of them, thank you.

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• 2 August 2026

  A country was often all this atlas had, so it went looking for the town

  27% of the filming statements this atlas reads point at a whole country or a state, and 52% of every video game setting does. That is why 1,206 productions had no pin at all and 860 of the 1,342 games sat on a dot in the middle of a country. Two changes, both inside the labelled Wikipedia stream added this morning: 396 of those productions now have real places, the map grew from 10,417 places to 12,583, and 30 games left their country dot behind. First, the parser stopped needing a heading that says Filming. Of the 640 pinless productions that have an English article, only 62 had such a heading, while most kept their locations in a plain Production section, so outside a Filming heading a link now counts when its own sentence says where a camera stood. Troy was four country names and is now Mellieħa, Comino and Cabo San Lucas. Out of Africa was the word Kenya and is now Karen, Lang’ata and the Ngong Hills. Tokyo Story was the word Japan and is now Chiyoda, Adachi, Chūō, Taitō, Kamakura, Atami and Osaka. The Grapes of Wrath is Oklahoma City, McAlester, Bridgeport and Sayre. The Green Mile is Shelbyville and the old Formosa lot. Second, video games are read the same way, with set in as the cue instead of filmed in, because a game is filmed nowhere. Battlefield 3 carried five country dots and now carries Tehran, Kuwait City, Sulaymaniyah and New York. Bloodlines was a dot in the middle of the United States and is now Santa Monica, Hollywood, Downtown and Chinatown. Assassin’s Creed Unity was a dot in France and is now the Île de la Cité, the Marais, the Latin Quarter and Versailles. Metro 2033 is Moscow, Ghost of Tsushima is Tsushima Island, Infamous: Second Son is Seattle. When a game finds a real place its country dot disappears, because that dot was only ever a fallback for knowing nothing finer. The label had to change with it: of the 4,764 productions carrying this kind of evidence only 1,603 got it from a Filming section, 1,337 came from Production and 1,219 from more than one section at once, so every card, page, download and API answer now names the section a claim really came from, or says article when no single one is true. Still wrong or missing. Only English Wikipedia is read. A place named in a sentence for some other reason can still slip the guard, which is exactly why the label is there: Frostpunk is set in a frozen 1886 and shows Krakatoa, because the eruption is named in the same sentence, and Stronghold shows the Iberian Peninsula on the strength of a line about its Spanish translation. 810 productions still have no pin and 830 games still sit on a country, because nothing finer is written down anywhere this atlas can read. Suggested by mushroommunk on Lemmy, whose point that the sections are richer than the statements turned out to be truer of the whole article than of the sections.

• 2 August 2026

  A Bond film says it is a Bond film

  Skyfall knew its year and its places and nothing about the twenty six other films it belongs with. Every production that is part of a series or franchise now says so, on its page and on the map panel, and the line links a new kind of page: one per series, 481 of them, gathering every member in order and every place they used, deduplicated, with the two kinds of evidence kept apart exactly as they are everywhere else on this atlas. The James Bond series carries 27 productions here, the Marvel Cinematic Universe 46, the Wizarding World 21. Membership is not this site’s opinion: it is Wikidata’s part of the series and media franchise statements, class checked so that only film, television and game series qualify, which is why Game of Thrones does not claim to belong to A Song of Ice and Fire on a page about filming. A series with a single member on the atlas gets the line and no page, and a series Wikidata has not recorded stays invisible, which has the usual fix: add the statement upstream and this site follows on the next rebuild.

• 2 August 2026

  Wikipedia is read at last, and every claim says which source it rests on

  Two days ago the entry below this one said reading filming locations out of Wikipedia prose was considered and not done, because a pin here is a statement you can check in one click. It is done now, in the shape that entry demanded: nothing is mixed. The atlas read the Filming section of 3,155 English Wikipedia articles and found 12,866 places for 2,593 productions that no Wikidata statement carries, among them 6,087 places this map had never seen. Every one is labelled per Wikipedia on the card, the page, the downloads and the MCP endpoint, and links the exact section it came from, because a sentence in an article is weaker evidence than a statement, and pretending otherwise would cost this atlas the one thing it has. What it buys is the difference between an outline and an answer. Gladiator goes from two countries to Ouarzazate, Bourne Wood and the Val d’Orcia. Lawrence of Arabia goes from one London pin to Almería, Ouarzazate, Petra and the Plaza de España. Casablanca gains the Van Nuys Airport that played its runway. Transformers: The Last Knight, which carries not one Wikidata statement, appears with nineteen places, down to Alnwick Castle and Michigan Central Station. Suggested by mushroommunk on Lemmy, who was right that the sections are richer than the statements. A guard drops places a shoot only nearly happened at or merely pretended to show, like the Toronto that The Terminator planned and left for Los Angeles; it removed 1,153 links, and Aatube on Lemmy supplied the counterexamples it was built against. Silent Hill now shows the Brantford a commenter lived in while it was shot, who asked to stay uncredited. Public Enemies gains its Wisconsin towns down to the Little Bohemia Lodge, raised by Zorque. Batman v Superman gains the East Lansing art museum ThePantser pointed to. Peter Pan & Wendy gains the Bonavista Peninsula vithigar asked about. Still wrong or missing: only English Wikipedia is read, a place an article mentions in passing can slip the guard, The Shipping News has no Filming section to read, and The Grand Seduction sits below every fame bar. The labels exist because mistakes of this kind are possible; say so when you find one.

• 31 July 2026

  Hong Kong is listed as Hong Kong

  Every place in Hong Kong was filed under China, because that is the country Wikidata records for them. It is correct about sovereignty and unhelpful on a film map: Hong Kong is the ninth busiest location on this atlas at 112 productions, it has its own ISO code, and its cinema is a body of work nobody looks for under China. It now reports as Hong Kong, and so does Macau. This is the one place the atlas knowingly prints something other than what the country field says, and it is a labelling choice and nothing more.

• 31 July 2026

  Considered, and not done: filming locations read from Wikipedia

  Several people on Lemmy pointed out that Wikipedia articles carry far more detail than Wikidata does, in tidy Filming sections, and they are right. It was built and measured: 38 percent of productions here have such a section, and a sample of 120 of them turned up 151 places this map does not have, including the Brantford that somebody specifically asked for. It has not been added, and will not be without a rethink, because every pin on this site is a single Wikidata filming location statement you can check in one click, and a place taken from prose is a weaker kind of evidence. Mixing the two quietly would cost the only thing this atlas has that the bigger ones do not. If it ever arrives it will say, pin by pin, which kind of evidence it rests on.

• 31 July 2026

  A second door in, for cinema the world writes less about

  dual_sport_dork on Lemmy pointed out that Bollywood was barely on the map, and they were right. Productions got in by how many Wikipedia language editions cover them, which is a fair measure of fame and an unfair measure of where the fame is: a mid tier American film clears the bar easily, a film that is enormous in Korea or Italy often does not. A production now also gets in if it is among the top 300 of its own country of origin. That admitted 2,094 more productions, took Mumbai from 8 titles to 23 and India from 11 places to 33, and brought in national classics the old rule could never reach, like the first Indonesian feature and a 1917 Mexican silent. It is not the whole answer to that complaint: Wikidata records no filming location at all for most Indian films, even the famous ones, and no threshold here can invent one.

• 31 July 2026

  Invented places, put on the real ones behind them

  A video game is filmed nowhere, so Wikidata places it by where its story happens, and sometimes that place does not exist. Where Wikidata also records what the invented place is based on, or which real place it sits inside, the pin now goes there and says so on its face: Kamurochō on Kabukichō, Sōtenbori on Dōtonbori, Libertatia on Antongil Bay. Nine of them so far. This is the only two step claim on the atlas, which is why those pins carry the invented name, name the real place they borrow their coordinates from, and sit in a layer you can switch off.

• 31 July 2026

  Every country has a photograph now

  The country pins had no pictures, and the reason turned out to be specific: a country almost never carries a photograph on Wikidata, only a flag, a coat of arms and a locator map. None of those is a picture of anywhere. They now fall back to the Wikivoyage banner, which is a real photograph chosen to represent the place. Twenty three blank country pins became two, and twenty five other places gained a picture as well. Flags and locator maps are still not used: a flag is not a place.

• 31 July 2026

  The card shows everything now, and scrolls

  A pinned card used to list twelve productions, which meant the map could tell you that 620 things were shot in New York and then show you twelve of them. It now lists all of them and scrolls. The dataset was capped at sixty per place as well, so no amount of scrolling would have reached the rest; that cap is gone, at a cost of ten kilobytes.

• 31 July 2026

  Games set in a whole country are on the map, in their own layer

  Until now a game whose setting Wikidata records only as a country was dropped, on the grounds that "set in the United States" answers nothing. That was true of a page and wrong about a map, so those games are now pinned at the country, in a layer of their own that you can switch off, and the pin says plainly that it is a whole area and not a spot. A game that already has a real place does not get one, because a dot in the middle of the Czech Republic adds nothing next to twelve named Bohemian villages. Games went from 430 to 1,183.

• 31 July 2026

  A bug that had been quietly deleting places

  Every place that only a video game referenced had vanished from the atlas, with no error anywhere: the code that reads coordinates matched one spelling of the format, the two data services this site queries spell it differently, and whenever the slower one answered, the locations were silently skipped. Kingdom Come lost all twelve of its Bohemian villages that way. One character fixed it, and the places are back.

• 31 July 2026

  The whole atlas is downloadable, and machine readable

  Every filming location is now available as GeoJSON and CSV, with a second file for the productions, free and with no account. There is also a live endpoint that an AI assistant can query directly, so it can answer where something was filmed without scraping seven thousand pages. Both carry the same distinction the site does: a film was filmed somewhere, a game is set somewhere.

• 30 July 2026

  Pages that were competing with their own namesakes

  Four different films are called The Three Musketeers and two German towns are called Moosach. Their pages were distinct in every way except the line a search engine leans on hardest, so 239 pages were quietly competing with a namesake. Each now carries the year, or the description, or as a last resort its own Wikidata id.

• 30 July 2026

  Video games got a filter, and a map of their own

  The map can now be filtered to films, series or games. Games nearly doubled at the same time, and every surface that shows one repeats the same thing: a game is set there, not filmed there.

• 28 July 2026

  The site moved to thefilmmap.com

  It used to live at flight007.com, which was the wrong address for a film map in a way that only showed up in a search engine: every result for that name is an air disaster. Every old link redirects, and every page came with it.

• 26 July 2026

  First published

  An interactive map of the places films and television were actually shot, built only from filming location statements on Wikidata, with a page for every production and every place.

Corrections are welcome and they land upstream: every fact here comes from Wikidata, so a fix there appears on this map at the next rebuild and helps everyone using that data, not only this site.