Where Every Film Was Shot: Filming Locations of Films in Wikidata, Film Cities, Foreign Productions and the James Bond Films

Films are often shot somewhere other than where they come from or where they are set. I use Wikidata, the open knowledge base behind Wikipedia, to map the filming locations of every film it records with a located filming place: 23,468 films, 7,926 locations and 35,108 film-location pairs. Because 20% of those pairs name only a whole country and 14% only a state or region, I classify each location by level and map only cities, towns and sites, so that country centroids do not appear as filming hotspots. Grouping places with the nearest large city, Los Angeles (1,514 films), New York (1,350), London (1,118) and Paris (933) lead; Pinewood Studios is the single most used site (645 films). Comparing each location's country with the film's countries of origin, 19% of films were shot at least partly abroad. Canada hosts the most foreign productions (717, 95% of them American), while in Malta, Morocco, Bulgaria and Iceland foreign films are the large majority of all recorded filming. The share of films shot abroad rose from 20% in the 1950s to 25% in the 2000s (excluding Indonesia). The 25 Eon James Bond films have 248 recorded locations in 36 countries and territories, but recent films are far better documented than early ones. Coverage is strongly biased towards American and well-known films: 40% of films are American, and the most popular films have nearly three times as many recorded locations as the least known. Interactive version: https://maps.tristanhotham.com/film-locations/. Data and code: https://github.com/Tristan-Hotham/film-locations. Blog post: https://blog.tristanhotham.com/2026/10/31/film-locations/.