Where Were 2023’s Biggest Movies Filmed?

Greta Gerwig’s Barbie was largely filmed at the Warner Bros. gargantuan studio in Leavesden, England, and though you may not be able to go inside, there are real locations you can visit like Venice Beach, California where the iconic roller skating scenes were shot. And despite being shot in a studio, Gerwig did reveal that everything you see in Barbie Land (the trees, the buildings, the streets) is very real and built entirely from scratch to create a fully immersive universe.

The fourth installment of the John Wick franchise starring Keanu Reeves follows the titular protagonist on his journey to exact revenge on the High Table, a massively powerful international crime syndicate, after they’d nearly killed him at the end of the third John Wick movie. Filming took place in cities across the world like New York, Berlin, Osaka, Paris, and Tokyo. After Chapter 4’s worldwide release, Lionsgate announced the series would be getting a fifth installment in the future meaning we might see the brooding hitman zipping from one corner of the world to the next again soon.

The inescapable biopic from director Christopher Nolan, Oppenheimer, was filmed in the New Mexico cities of Santa Fe and Los Alamos. Nolan wanted to be able to shoot at a myriad of real-life Manhattan Project buildings like the actual home of Oppenheimer and his wife Kitty, the Fuller Lodge, and the Lamy Train Station. Many of the interior shots for the Los Alamos scenes were filmed in the sweeping Ghost Ranch in northern New Mexico. Nolan and the Oppenheimer production team were even granted access to film in the White Sands Proving Ground where the Trinity test (the first detonation of a nuclear weapon by the Manhattan Project) took place. Oppenheimer code-named the Trinity test after a poem by English scholar John Dunne, a favorite of Oppenheimer and his former mistress, psychiatrist, and Communist Party member Jean Tatlock (played by Florence Pugh in the film).

The long-anticipated follow-up to 2018’s Creed II, the 2023 sports drama directed by and starring Michael B. Jordan follows the newly retired Apollo Creed (Jordan) in a challenge for a championship title against his childhood friend, boxing prodigy Damian “Diamond Dame” Anderson (played by Jonathan Majors). Filming for the third installment began in January 2022, shooting in locations across Los Angeles, Tampa, and Atlanta. Scenes of Anderson training were shot in Venice, California’s Muscle Beach while exterior shots and rooftop sequences were filmed in the exclusive Hollywood Hills neighborhood to fully encapsulate the opulence and wealth the Creed family enjoys.

The latest sprawling epic from Martin Scorsese, Killers of the Flower Moon, focuses on a series of brutal murders carried out by settlers against members of the Osage Nation after vast oil reserves are discovered beneath the tribe’s ancestral land. Like the film, production took place entirely in Oklahoma, namely Osage and Washington counties, where the atrocities described in author David Grann’s 2017 book of the same name took place. Before production was delayed due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Scorsese traveled to the Osage Nation lands in June 2019 to meet with Geoffrey Standing Bear, an Osage Principal Chief that he consulted with during production. With a staggering budget of $200 million, Killers of the Flower Moon was reportedly the most costly film shot in Oklahoma’s history.

Even though the raunchy comedy takes place in the East Hampton hamlet of Montauk, production for Lawrence’s latest film was predominantly in locations throughout Long Island’s Nassau County. Then again, a couple of key Montauk locations like the Montauk Point Lighthouse and Gosman’s Dock were used. Production also shot scenes in the animal rescue at the North Shore Animal League America located in Port Washington, New York, a few hours drive west of Montauk.

The fifth and final installment in the long-running Indiana Jones franchise, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, was shot throughout the United Kingdom, Morocco, and Italy. Filming began at Pinewood Studios in Iver Heath, England before moving to shoot at the North Yorkshire Moors Railway and later Bamburgh Castle located on England’s northeast coast. Additionally, the production team shot a plethora of action sequences throughout Scotland and later transformed Glasgow’s city center into New York City in 1969 during a parade celebrating the safe return of the Apollo 11 astronauts. The film’s crew then headed to Sicily to shoot scenes intended to be set in Greece before finally journeying to Morocco to film in the cities of Ouijda and Fez. After filming in Morocco concluded, the film’s remaining scenes were shot back at Pinewood Studios before the crew wrapped filming for good in early 2022.

The latest installment in the quintessential slasher franchise, Scream VI, features the return of Ghostface as he begins targeting the survivors of the Woodsboro murders from the franchise’s previous installment. Though the film was set in New York City (a new locale for the franchise), production for the slasher took place in the city of Montreal in Quebec, Canada. A departure from the series’ traditional parochial backdrop of Woodsboro, California, the new setting gave the film a fresh feeling while still holding onto the classic horror tropes audiences have come to love. In August 2023, it was announced that Christopher Landon would be taking over direction for the film’s sequel, Scream VII, but there’s been no word as to whether the next installment will return to Woodsboro or stay set in the Big Apple.