30 Locations That Are Famous Because A Popular Movie Was Filmed There

There's something magical about being in a place you've seen many times in a film or a TV show. Film directors and their DPs know how to capture places at their most beautiful, but we want to visit filming locations not only because of their beauty.

It can make us feel closer to the piece of art somehow. Who wouldn't want to run around Central Park pretending the Wet Bandits are chasing them? It almost makes us feel like we can step into the movies we love so much, and makes the films a tad less fantastical and more relatable in our minds.

The Historic Film Locations group on Facebook is a community of almost 900k members, most of whom are cinema fans and film tourists. The group believes that movies "hold cultural history & meaning within each generation of film watchers/lovers," and so they encourage people to explore film locations.

Granted, some of the locations people share in the group have changed drastically since we've seen them on the screen. But that's no reason not to visit the locations; in fact, it adds more excitement. We might not want to see the exact replicas of the scenes, but we're rather more curious about what it feels like to stand in the same spot our favorite actors did.

Historic Film Locations is not only a group on Facebook. In fact, it all started with a website, created by Paul S., now an admin. Bored Panda got in touch with the creator, and he told us that his website was born in 2011. He says he wanted to document the filming locations he had visited and planned to visit in the future and decided to do that in website form.

Thus, the Then & Now Filming Locations website was born. "I include the address of every single location I post, so anyone else who may wish can also visit the location," Paul S. told us. "It's a very fun hobby and I enjoy it a lot." As far as hobbies go, this one is indeed a pretty cool one to have!

"There's just something special about being in an actual place that you saw in one of your favorite movies or television shows," Paul goes on. He also clarifies that while he is an admin for the Historic Film Locations Facebook group, it was actually created by David Broido. 

Some filming locations can be tricky to find, especially when filmmakers use many props and the place doesn't look exactly like it did in the movie. Yours truly had some personal experience with this while looking for the place the hobbits were hiding from the Nazgul in The Fellowship of the Ring. I knew the place was in Mount Victoria, Wellington, but I looked for the exact place for almost an hour even with directions from people online.