• Anyone but You: Parts of Australia doubled for Boston in the beginning of the film, before being averted entirely due to the rest of the film being set in the country.
• Aquamarine takes place in a fictitious suburb of Tampa, Florida, but was filmed on the Gold Coast of Queensland (coincidentally, one of the main trio moving to Australia is a plot point in the movie).
• Beneath Hill 60 was filmed largely outside Townsville, Queensland; including both the scenes set in the area, and the scenes set in the trenches of WW1 Europe.
• blacklight: Canberra, Australia doubles as Washington, DC (the Australian federal capital playing the US federal capital).
• Child Star: The Shirley Temple Story is set in depression-era Los Angeles, but was filmed in Melbourne.
• Code Red: the Rubicon Conspiracy was set in the jungles of Africa, but filmed in Australia.
• Dark City: The only real giveaway that the filming took place primarily in a studio near Sydney is the somewhat out of place Australian accent of a young police officer who talks to Detective Bumstead in one scene.
• Dora and the Lost City of Gold is set in Los Angeles and Peru, but was filmed in and around Brisbane and the Gold Coast.
• Elvis (2022) was set almost entirely in the United States, with a couple scenes set in what was then West Germany. However the film was shot entirely in Queensland, Australia.
• House of Wax (2005) was shot in Queensland, with areas around the Gold Coast doubling for Louisiana.
• Inspector Gadget 2 is set in the fictional Riverton, Ohio but was filmed in and around Brisbane, Australia with an Australian supporting cast. The commentary track on the DVD notes that actors would occasionally lapse back into their natural Australian accents.
• Sydney stood in for San Francisco in The Invisible Man.
• In Knowing, Melbourne serves as a stand-in for both Boston and parts of New York City.
• The Marine was mostly shot in Queensland, Australia but set in South Carolina.
• The Matrix (1999) was filmed entirely in Australia. In the scene in which Neo says "I used to eat lunch there. Good noodles", the car is clearly driving through the Chinatown end of George street in Sydney's CBD, and the Sydney Tower and the Maritime Services Board control tower are visible amongst the city's skyline.
• Mee-Shee: The Water Giant is set in the lakes of British Columbia but filmed in New Zealand.
• Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers: The Movie was filmed entirely in Australia, though the series at the time was set in California.
• Zig-zagged with Peter Rabbit (2018): the scenes in London were shot in both London itself and Sydney (e.g. the scenes at Harrods in London were actually shot there, while the scenes in Paddington Station were actually filmed at Sydney Central Station).
• The Phantom had Warner Bros Movie World on Queensland's Gold Coast and the city of Brisbane doubling for various US locations.
• Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales has Queensland doubling for the Caribbean.
• Inverted in Point Break (1991), where the scenes set in Australia were actually filmed in Oregon.
• The Punisher (1989) had the title character pulling up on his motorcycle outside a CES sign, which any Australian of the time would recognize as the Commonwealth Employment Service (the govt organization that handed out dole payments). Ironically the service was privatized some time ago, so anyone watching it on DVD now would likely not recognize it.
• In The Ripper (1997), Melbourne, Victoria doubles for Victorian London. As Melbourne has plenty of Victorian architecture, and even some surviving cobbled streets, it works quite well. The only real giveaway is a scene shot in a park by the Yarra River that features some distinctive palm trees familiar to any Melbournian.
• Scooby-Doo (2002) was filmed in Australia, but is set mostly on a fictional US island/theme park named "Spooky Island". The opening scenes not taking place on the island were also filmed here. Filming moved to Vancouver, Canada for the sequel.
• Parts of San Andreas are set in California but were filmed in the Lockyer Valley just west of Brisbane, Australia.
• The Shallows takes place in Mexico (and briefly in Texas), and was shot in Queensland and New South Wales.
• Sniper was set in Central America, but much of it was shot in Northern Queensland; the lost hotel was Paronella park and the rail insertion scene was filmed on the Cairns-Kuranda Railway, which looks rather ridiculous if you think about it, as the Panama Railroad seen in the film was built to Old Russian (5') gauge at the time, and was since rebuilt to Standard Gauge (4' 8 1/2"), while the Queensland Government Railways vehicles the characters de-train from were, and would always have been, Cape gauge (3'6").
• Set in the universal American city, Metropolis, all of Superman Returns was filmed in New South Wales, primarily in Sydney. The Smallville scenes were filmed in Breeza, a country town.
• Thor: Ragnarok has a few scenes set in New York City, which were mostly filmed in Brisbane. Thor: Love and Thunder was also filmed in Australia, with the Earth location this time being the Norwegian location of New Asgard (which in its previous appearance was filmed in Scotland).
• Ticket to Paradise, set in Bali, was actually filmed in Queensland.
• Parts of The Wolverine set in Japan and Canada were filmed in and around Sydney, Australia.
• Upgrade has various road signs in the U.S. style, and the cars have the driver on the left-hand side. However, some shots early in the film clearly show Melbourne's Bolte Bridge.

• Bootleg was filmed in Melbourne. Though the series was set in Britain, a lot of distinctly Australian things sneak through such as licence plates and signs, and one prominent scene was filmed outside the Melbourne Museum and had a clear shot of the Royal Exhibition Building.
• Cybergirl was set in a fictitious city named "River City", which was a very thinly-veiled version of Brisbane (the location of River City was never given).
• Deadly Women: The show is filmed in Australia using Australian actors, and it shows sometimes. Because of this, nearly all of the actors portray Fake Nationality as well. This also explains why most of the cars being seen driven (except on rare occasions where they slip up) are old models, as the cars need to be left-side steering wheel cars (Australia is a right-side steering wheel country) for episodes based outside of Australia or other commonwealth countries.
• Farscape filmed entirely in Australia, including Earth scenes that were supposed to be located on the Florida Space Coast. For all that the beaches are decidedly different, upper middle class tract housing can evidently be pretty similar in both places.
  • Specifically: IASA's HQ shown in "Won't Get Fooled Again" was shot in and around Sydney Olympic Park, in Homebush (a 5min drive from the studio where seasons 2-4 were shot) - ANZ stadium doubles as a launch pad (CGI rocket stuck in the middle of it) and the distinct spiral building seen several times in the background is actually part of the car park near the Acer Arena. The gardens in the "Look At The Princess" trilogy were actually the Japanese gardens in Auburn. The beach in "Scratch & Sniff" was in Maroubra. The dock often seen in Crichton's dream sequences was actually right outside the industrial park in Homebush where seasons 2-4 were shot. The old gun emplacement at Middle Head doubled for several alien military encampments and ancient ruins.
• K9 was filmed in Brisbane, although the show is set in London in 2050.
• Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers: Filming for the movie was scheduled to finish during a break mid-Season 2, but difficulties left the Ranger cast down under longer than expected. To prevent delays for Season 2, their scenes in two three-parters ("The Wedding" and "Return of the Green Ranger") were filmed in Australia. Note, though, that "The Wedding" has a sub-plot with a school trip to Australia (which allowed for scenes making more extensive use of the area), whereas "Return of the Green Ranger" takes place in Angel Grove, California.
• The 1988 TV revival of Mission: Impossible was filmed in Brisbane, and later Melbourne. The Brisbane TV station screening the series ran a competition asking viewers to pick out the local landmarks used. (Averted in three episodes - "The Cattle King" and "The Golden Serpent" parts 1 and 2 - which did involve Australia!)
• The entirety of The Pacific was filmed in various locations around Victoria. It doubles for everything from Guadalcanal and Pelieliu to Mobile, Alabama, and California. It's also averted when the Marines actually go to Melbourne on Liberty.
• Time Trax had the hero "travelling through our world, searching for fugitives from his own," but all of this travelling was done in Australia ("Photo Finish" was a rare episode to be set there).

• Black Christmas (2019) takes place in an un-named American college town, but was filmed in Dunedin and Oamaru in the Otago region of New Zealand.
• Boogeyman (2005) had the US be played by New Zealand.
• Bridge to Terabithia: New Zealand as The Deep South.
• Battletruck is supposedly set in the United States after a devastating conflict called the Oil Wars, with the main characters fighting against a rogue former US Army Colonel. But the film is very obvious about its having been filmed on New Zealand's South Island, including a couple of long shots of motorcycles going dramatically cross-country in front of the Southern Alps
• The Disney Channel Original Movies Eddie's Million Dollar Cook-Off, Avalon High and Wendy Wu: Homecoming Warrior were all filmed in New Zealand while taking place in an unspecified Middle America locale, Maryland and California, respectively.
• TV film Fatal Contact: Bird Flu in America takes place around the world (mainly in Richmond, Virginia), but was primarily filmed in New Zealand.
• Ghost in the Shell (2017) was partly filmed in Wellington, New Zealand's capital city, which doubled as Hong Kong.
• New Zealand doubled for Japan in The Last Samurai; the reason being is that there wasn't any wide spaces for the battles in Japan, plus the availability of a stunt double for Mt Fuji. It's particularly jarring for anyone watching the first battle scene in the forest if they have lived in NZ for some time. There were just too many silver ferns around that have been taught since primary school were native to New Zealand.
• The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit trilogies were filmed almost entirely in New Zealand, a country which apparently is the closest they could find to limitless untouched landscape, save for the scenes that required a green screen. According to the DVD extras, about the only location they couldn't find was the rolling green prairies of Rohan — a slightly less-mountainous area was used instead.
  • Peter Jackson also had New Zealand play California (The Frighteners) and New York (King Kong (2005)). The Broadway hall where Carl Denham exhibits Kong to New York was played by Auckland's Civic Theatre. At the peak of the stage's proscenium arch is a winged globe with a silhouette of New Zealand clearly visible.
• Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence was partly filmed in Auckland, specifically the Railway Station as a Javanese military court and King's College as a South African boarding school.
• Pete's Dragon (2016) was shot in New Zealand but takes place in a Everytown, America setting.
• The Power of the Dog is a Western, set in Montana and filmed in the Otago region of New Zealand.
• New Zealand doubled for Oregon in Without a Paddle (they had the same costumer from The Lord of the Rings!), which had forests that were simply not thick enough to be Pacific Northwest.
• X and Pearl, set in a backwoods Texas city and farmhold, was filmed in Fordell and Whanganui.
• X-Men Origins: Wolverine was mostly shot in New Zealand.

• Following in the footsteps of the movies, The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power was also shot in New Zealand. Season 2 was filmed in both New Zealand and the UK.
• Power Rangers: Every season from Ninja Storm to Cosmic Fury was filmed in New Zealand, in spite of being set in various U.S. localities, including California, a domed city and a worldwide treasure hunt. Aside from some amusing locational irregularities (such as using footage of New Zealand's lush grassy landscapes and identifying it as being the Everglades), this resulted, especially in the Disney seasons, in Australian and New Zealander actors playing Americans. They've thrown in a few gags, like Piggy getting teleported there and landing in the middle of a herd of sheep.
• Neither Xena: Warrior Princess or Hercules: The Legendary Journeys were filmed anywhere near Greece. New Zealand, particularly West Auckland, made a passable substitute. New Zealand also doubled for China and Japan in Xena. Not to be mention present-day America in both series ("Yes, Virginia, There Is A Hercules" and "Deja Vu All Over Again").

• Some films shot in the Toronto area: Cinderella Man, The Pacifier, Bulletproof Monk, Kick-Ass, Dawn of the Dead (2004). Ironically, a belated coda for Dawn was shot in California.
• David Cronenberg - who shoots the vast majority of his films in his native Toronto - actually averted this trope in Maps to the Stars by filming some scenes in Hollywood proper.
• Many Canadian genre films of the 1970s and early 1980s, including Black Christmas and Prom Night, would be produced with the lucrative American film market in mind, and as such would often be set in innocuous, Middle American locales while being shot in and near Toronto. Often times, this would be indicated through the presence of American paraphernalia while avoiding any direct on-screen reference to a specific location, in an effort to keep the film's setting ambiguous enough to avoid alienating any particular geographic demographic.
• Bulletproof Monk is set in an unnamed American city strongly resembling New York, but was filmed in Toronto and Hamilton.
• The Boondock Saints: Both films were made in Toronto, with the exception of overhead establishing shots in Boston. The CN Tower can be seen, as well as a Toronto Dominion bank.
• Chicago (Musical) was shot in Toronto. Naturally, this annoyed many Chicago viewers — when asked what he thought of the movie, Mayor Richard M. Daley replied that he "would have liked it better if it had been filmed in Chicago!", and noted Chicagoan Roger Ebert stated "If a musical named 'O Canada' were currently being filmed in Chicago, how would that make you feel?"
• Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen was mostly filmed in the Toronto area. In one scene, two characters walk by a restaurant that prominently displays the green "Pass" sign issued by the Toronto Board of Health to indicate a restaurant that passed its health standards test with flying colours.
• The movie Don't Say a Word was filmed in an abandoned subway station in Toronto filling in for a New York City station. The station (Lower Bay) has filled in for NYC and Chicago stations so many times that the Toronto Transit Commission asked that the movie set be donated to them, giving them a selling point for future location shoots.
• In Down in the Delta, the crime-ridden Chicago neighborhood where Rosa lives with her daughter and grandkids is played by Toronto.
• Dream Scenario was shot in Toronto, with a US setting.
• Equus was filmed in Toronto, despite being set in England. It was made during the era of the UK/Canada tax shelter co-production, plus Richard Burton was a tax refugee from the Inland Revenue. The extras look quite Canadian, and the locations look not quite right, especially the farm and the streets. They're not completely unconvincing, but they're not quite perfect matches either. This odd feel actually adds to the film's discomforting feel. Plus extras have audible Canadian accents.
• For the Steven Seagal film Exit Wounds, not only did Toronto and nearby Hamilton double for Detroit...so did Calgary.
• Fahrenheit 451 (2018) was filmed in Toronto and Hamilton while set in Cleveland. One might forgive the city's skyline being completely different given the movie's dystopian setting, except Lake Erie is completely absent. On the other hand, a Freeze-Frame Bonus reveals that Cleveland's subway map is based on the city's actual light rail system.
• Likewise, the Santiago Calatrava-designed galleria at BCE place appears in a number of science fiction films, notably Gattaca.
• Toronto stands in for Boston a few times in Good Will Hunting, but it was shot primarily in Massachusetts, and most of the Toronto scenes were interiors (U of T dorm rooms, local bars, the novelty shop etc).
• In the remake of Hairspray, the movie was set in Baltimore, but was filmed in Toronto. Vintage Toronto streetcars were prominent in the "Good Morning, Baltimore" opening sequence.
• The Incredible Hulk film (starring Edward Norton) was shot in Toronto, doubling for Harlem, New York. The climactic rumble was shot on a stretch of Yonge Street in Toronto, running from the intersection of Yonge & Dundas to about a block north. The Zanzibar strip club is a dead giveaway, as are the spinning records on the side of Sam the Record Man.
• Kick-Ass had both Hamilton and Toronto double for New York. Badly (as many instances of Canadian road signs, flags and trademarks still appear often).
  • When Kick-Ass and Red Mist first meet, as they drive along in the Mist Mobile it is clearly Yonge Street. They drive past HMV's Flagship store, the Eaton Centre, a Toronto Sun newspaper box and Sam the Record Man (unlike in the above mentioned Hulk, however, the records are not lit).
  • This is again obvious in the sequel: when Kick-Ass and Dr. Gravity are ambushed the first time they go on patrol together, they are across the street from a Mr. Sub, a submarine sandwich shop found solely in Canada.
  • In the scene where The Motherfucker robs the convenience store the street sign reads "Grosvenor St", the actual scene taking place at the intersection of Yonge and Grosvenor.
• The Long Kiss Goodnight was in part shot in Toronto - you can see the Honest Ed's sign in the background in one scene.
• Mean Girls is set in the Chicago suburb of Evanston, Illinois, but was mostly shot in Toronto.
• Poltergeist (2015) is set in Illinois but was filmed in Hamilton and Toronto with the exterior shots of the house being filmed at the former and in interior in the latter.
• Red (2010) had Toronto double for many major cities (such as New York, Chicago, Washington, D.C. and Cleveland) while New Orleans doubled for several cities as well (such as Kansas City).
  • Stanton's speech and the ensuing raid are all shot in various parts of the Royal York Hotel in Toronto; Victoria's limo even lets her out in front of Toronto's Union Station.
  • In the 2003 Bollywood film Kal Ho Na Ho the majority of the film is set in New York, specifically in Brooklyn. But the majority of the sequences were filmed in Toronto, poorly albeit, since Canadian flags, signs, and Ontario license plates can be visible. It might annoy New Yorkers, eagle eyed film enthusiasts and those who expect doubling to be done correctly. However, the Indian audiences did not notice this as California Doubling is not a commonly used concept in Indian film and media.
• Resident Evil: Apocalypse features several things to make Torontonians grin. Perhaps the most obvious of which is the nuke that just so happens to explode right on City Hall (the recognizable dual curved towers). Other fun features include the fact the film makers neglected to airbrush out the CN Tower, numerous logos on buildings on the Bay St. area and the Toronto Sun logo on the sides of several paperboxes.
• The adaptation of Room was shot in Toronto, which stood in for Akron, Ohio. The Prince Edward Viaduct and the Don Valley Parkway can be seen out of a hospital window, and the brief skating scene near the end was shot at the rink at Nathan Phillips Square, with the concrete arches over the rink visible.
• In Score A Hockey Musical, the establishing shot of the Brampton Blades' home arena is actually a shot of the Port Credit Arena in Mississauga, Ontario (which makes this a case of California Doubling between two Canadian municipalities!).
• Lampshaded in Scott Pilgrim vs. The World (which has Toronto play itself) during Scott's fight with Lucas Lee, when at one point, Scott is sent flying through an Empire State Building backdrop, which tears, revealing the CN Tower behind it.
• Most of SHAZAM! (2019) had Toronto doubling for Philadelphia.
• Shoot 'em Up is also clearly shot in Toronto: They don't even try to hide the CN tower
• Short Circuit 2 was set in New York City, but obviously shot completely in Toronto and environs (including scenes at the Eaton Centre and World's Biggest Bookstore, two famous Toronto landmarks). You can even see the CN Tower in some shots if you look closely.
• Silver Streak has Toronto standing in for Los Angeles, Kansas City (though the Calgary skyline was used for an establishing shot), and Chicago (because the producers weren't able to find an American train line amenable to having one of their trains going out of control and crashing into a station for the climax). Remarkably, most of this was accomplished in one building - Union Station.
• Suck had Toronto doubling for Buffalo, Chicago and New York.
• Thoughtcrimes: The film is set in the US, but was shot at different locations around Toronto.
• X-Men 1 was primarily filmed there. For instance, the mansion interior was filmed in Casa Loma, a Toronto landmark.

• The art deco facade of the R. C. Harris Water Treatment Plant has appeared in several movies and TV series, usually as either the villains' lair (The Pretender, Mutant X, Undercover Brother) or an insane asylum (In the Mouth of Madness, RoboCop: The Series).
• The pilot for Against the Wall opened with loads of footage of some of the most famous Chicago landmarks (with "Sweet Home Chicago" playing in the background). But once the music stopped, it quickly became clear that most of the show was filmed in Toronto (aside from occasional uses of stock footage). During the pilot, the crew took the trouble of replicating Chicago Tribune newspaper boxes but didn't bother to disguise the street signs. Streetcar tracks are visible in a few downtown scenes, and the 'L' train tracks are noticeably absent (save for aforementioned stock footage).
• Boston Blue: The series is filmed in Toronto mostly, representing Boston.
• The Boys (2019) is set primarily in New York, but filmed in and around Greater Toronto.
• Designated Survivor is set in Washington, D.C. but filmed in Toronto.
• The Dresden Files used Toronto as a stand-in for Chicago.
• The Canadian TV series Due South, although ostensibly set in Chicago, was mainly filmed in Toronto. While most of the first two seasons featured establishing shots of the Chicago area, the distinction of scenes shot at recognizable Toronto landmarks became more noticeable in the last two seasons (on the other hand, the episode where the characters go to Toronto was filmed in... Chicago). The streetcar tracks are a dead giveaway in just about every exterior scene, as Chicago doesn't have street-running trolleys anymore. Not to mention the periodic occurrence of street signs saying things like "Centre Street".
• The Famous Jett Jackson is set in the fictitious town of Wilsted, North Carolina, but was filmed in the Greater Toronto Area.
• Fellow Travelers: The series was filmed in Toronto, but all the scenes are set in the United States.
• F/X: The Series is supposed to take place in New York, but it becomes obvious even early on that Toronto is doubling for it, as numerous landmarks are seen throughout the series, including the parking lot outside the famous Muchmusic building (at Queen and John Street), which even has a billboard for The Phantom of the Opera (which was playing a long engagement at the Pantages Theatre at that time). The raiilyard leading into Union Station are highlighted during the episode introducing Victor Loubar ("The Chameleon", while the Skydome and CN Tower can be glimpsed in the background of a few exterior shots.
• Ginny and Georgia: Set in New England, it's filming locations are Coburg and Toronto, Ontario.
• The Handmaid's Tale: The story is set in Cambridge, Massachusetts, but filmed in Toronto and Cambridge. In the scene of the pre-Gilead protest, the demonstrators march past the distinctive Toronto City Hall.
• Holly Hobbie is set in the fictional midwestern American town of Collinsville, but was filmed in the Toronto area.
• Cop procedural Night Heat filmed in Toronto and took place in a generic American city.
• Nikita was mainly filmed in Toronto and the surrounding Ontario area, which doubled for a very wide variety of locales, including New York City, rural New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Quebec, Russia, Belarus, China, Mexico, The Netherlands, and many more.
• Many of the exterior shots in the first season of Gilmore Girls were filmed in Unionville, Ontario, which can be weird during a rewatch of the series as the Stars Hollow scenes were filmed in Burbank for the rest of the series.
• Toronto doubles for Los Angeles in The L.A. Complex with a mix of location-shot establishing shots and yellow filters to make the sun look brighter.
• Memory of a Killer: The series is set in New York. It was filmed in Toronto and Port Perry, Ontario.
• While Monk used the California Doubling For Itself variant for the most part, season 1 was filmed in Canada. The pilot was filmed in Vancouver, but the rest of the season was filmed in Toronto. Starting in season 2, the filming all moved to Los Angeles. One difference that results is that the police station set and the set for Monk's apartment change significantly.
• October Faction: The series was filmed in Cambridge and Toronto, Ontario. It takes place in New York state, USA.
• Lampshade Hanging: The North American version of Queer as Folk (which was filmed entirely in Toronto, especially in the city's Gayborhood: Church-Wellesley Village) once had its characters point out the similarity of a Toronto street to a street in their hometown Pittsburgh.
• The Red Green Show, set in the Muskoka area of Ontario, was shot in the Greater Toronto Area (the rural areas near Hamilton certainly don't look like northern Ontario). Averted for a few scenes between the third and sixth seasons that were actually filmed in the Muskokas.
• As noted above, RoboCop: The Series and later, RoboCop: Prime Directives were set in Detroit like the movies they're based on, but were filmed in Toronto. Then again, none of the movies were actually filmed in Detroit, either.
• SCTV was set in the fictitious town of Melonville, but in the early seasons, was filmed/taped in Toronto. By the time NBC picked up the show in 1981, they had moved to Edmonton, Alberta.
• Shadowhunters is set in New York but is filmed exclusively in Toronto.
• Shining Time Station and The Noddy Shop are both set in the United States, but were both filmed in Canada.
• An episode of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds lampshades this when two characters get sent back in time to the 21st century. One misidentifies their location as New York City until the other corrects him by pointing out a big sign that says "Toronto" on it, because Toronto is actually Toronto this time.
• The Strain (2014): The series is filmed in the Toronto area; one of the most blatantly obvious examples is a scene in Season 1 that clearly has the interior of Toronto's Union Station doubling for New York City's Grand Central Station. In season 2, the exterior is used to double for the streets of Washington D.C. ^note This time, however, the doubling is really only obvious if you are intimately familiar with the geography with one or both of the involved cities.
• The American version of Skins was filmed in Toronto with the setting left ambiguous so American viewers could imagine it in their city. Unfortunately, they didn't bother to cover up some local signage on bus stops.
• Sue Thomas: F.B.Eye was set in Washington, D.C. but filmed in Toronto.
• Tracker (2001) was filmed in Toronto while being set in Chicago.
• Warehouse 13 is filmed in Toronto and the surrounding area, and they barely attempt to hide it. In the third season finale, there is a Valu-Mart which is supposed to be in Elk Ridge, South Dakota. Valu-Mart is a grocery store that doesn't exist outside of Canada at all. Union Station in Toronto doubled for Geneva, Switzerland in the second season premiere as well.
  • Not to mention the first season episode set in Chicago, even though streetcar tracks and a street sign for York Avenue (neither of which exist in Chicago) are visible.
  • There's a later episode with scenes set in Victorian London which is filmed in Toronto's historic Distillery District. This looks fairly authentic, since most buildings in the Distillery District are from the Victorian Era... except for the inclusion of a very (North) American-style street clock on a pole.
• War of the Worlds (1988): Toronto and its surrounding municipalities double for multiple cities within the U.S., with the bulk of the action implied to happen near or in San Francisco and some southern states (i.e. Nevada). Numerous locales in Mississauga, Ontario (located just outside Toronto) double for key locations, including Mississauga City Hall and the former Lakeview Generating Plant (the site of the Morthrai's base in the first two episodes of the second season).
• In Wonderfalls Toronto and environs double for upstate New York. Scenes in which the falls are actually visible are shot on the Canadian side - in some scenes the American Falls are clearly visible on the opposite bank, while the Horseshoe (Canadian) Falls are on the right, not the left.

• Despite 300 being set in Ancient Greece, the movie itself was filmed inside what was the Icestorm Studios in Montreal.
• The Disney Channel Original Movie Bad Hair Day, presumably set in Boston (although the city's never named, Laura Marano's character is stated as being accepted by MIT), was shot in Montreal.
• Barney's Great Adventure was filmed in the Montreal area but takes place in a generic Everytown, America setting.
• Battlefield Earth was filmed in Montreal, doubling for a generic Sci-Fi setting.
• City on Fire takes place in an unnamed Midwestern American city, but was shot entirely in Montreal. As a result, some French language signs can be seen in the city.
• Montreal and Vieux Québec also subbed for Paris and Murmansk in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and for Marseille and Montrichard in Catch Me If You Can.
• Cyberbully takes place in St. Louis, Missouri but was shot in Montreal.
• Major portions of The Day After Tomorrow were filmed in Montreal despite taking place in multiple locations around the world. Some portions were shot in Toronto and Los Angeles, though.
• Highlander III: The Sorcerer has a scene set in a New York airport. One of the signs visible in the background reads "Bienvenue à Montréal".
• Some of the New York scenes in John Wick: Chapter 2 were filmed in Montreal, including the opening vehicle chase as well as parts of the subway fights.
• On the Basis of Sex, a biopic about the life of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, takes place in multiple U.S. locations, including Washington D.C., but was filmed in and around Montreal.
• Moonfall is primarily set across many United States locations, but the COVID-19 pandemic prevented location shooting, so all was done in Montreal, mostly in soundstages.
• Scream VI is set in New York and filmed in Montreal.
• X-Men (Film Series):
  • X-Men: Days of Future Past: The Paris scenes were filmed in Old Montreal, and parts of the Pentagon (like the area where we see visitors touring the building, and when Charles and Logan are walking alone in a basement corridor) are from the Arts Building at McGill University. The Moscow bunker is located beneath the rafters of The Big O (the informal name of Montreal's Olympic Stadium). Mystique jumped out of the window of the mayor's office at Montreal City Hall.
  • X-Men: Apocalypse: The exterior of John Abbott College (located in a suburb of Montreal) was the stand-in for the Auschwitz concentration camp. The steel mill factory where Erik works is in Saint-Ours, a town about 75 km from Montreal. The East Berlin fight club venue is the Corona Theatre in Old Montreal.

• Being Human (US) is set in Boston, but filmed in Montreal.
• Blue Mountain State was filmed in Montreal but takes place in an unspecified region of the United States.
• The Bold Type is set in New York City but is shot in Montreal.
• Ghosts (US) is set in upstate New York, but filmed in Montreal.

• The majority of filming for The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, set in the American Old West, was done in Calgary, Canmore and Edmonton.
• Brokeback Mountain is set in Wyoming, but it was filmed almost entirely in the Canadian Rockies in southern Alberta.
• Finders Keepers is set on a cross-country train ride through the Southwest United States, but was filmed entirely in Alberta.
• Ghostbusters: Afterlife is set in Oklahoma, but was filmed almost entirely in Alberta.
• In Interstellar, the unspecified countryside of the US Midwest was shot mostly in southern Alberta and other neighbouring Canadian prairie provinces.
• The Hong Kong film Paper Marriage has Edmonton doubling for Los Angeles.
• Prey (2022) is set in the Great Plains, but was shot on Stoney Nakoda First Nation land in Alberta.
• The Order (2024): The film is set around several locations in the US. It was filmed entirely in Alberta.
• A portion of Rat Race was filmed in Alberta, with most of the highway scenes shot within the city of Calgary's boundaries. The scene with Owen Templeton's coin toss was shot at McMahon Stadium during a CFL game.
• Shanghai Noon, set in Nevada, was filmed entirely in the Alberta Badlands area.
• Snow Day was set in Syracuse, New York, but was filmed in Edmonton.
• The Smallville scenes in Superman (1978) were filmed in the small Alberta towns of Blackie, Beynon and Barons.
• Togo is a film about the 1925 serum run to Nome, Alaska, but was shot in and around Cochrane, Alberta.

• Honey I Shrunk The Kids The TV Show was set in Matheson, Colorado, but was filmed entirely in Calgary, being one of the first projects to use the makeshift studios at the former Currie Barracks.
• The first three seasons of Fargo are set in Minnesota, as the opening title cards make abundantly clear, but were filmed in Calgary and surrounding Alberta towns.
• The Last of Us (2023) is filmed in Alberta; using both plain and mountain locations as stand-ins for areas around Boston, Kansas City, Wyoming, Colorado, and Utah. The series changed the location of some events in the game it is based on from Pittsburgh to Kansas City because the landscape was a better match.
• My Life with the Walter Boys is set in Colorado, but all filming took place in Alberta.
• Stingray (1985) took place in various locations as Ray travelled to help people in need, but it was filmed in Canada, in Calgary and Vancouver.

• Doune Castle, in Scotland, was used as an English castle in Ivanhoe.
• Ready Player One (2018) has Birmingham, UK double for protagonist Wade Watts' hometown, a dystopian futuristic Columbus, Ohio.
• Stanley Kubrick did a lot of England Doubling once he moved there in 1962 (the exception being Barry Lyndon, where it's Ireland Doubling):
  • His first was Lolita, which starts in New Hampshire and later goes on a cross-country journey, without leaving Great Britain.
  • Doctor Strangelove, which asides from a plane en route to the USSR, is split between the War Room in DC and a base somewhere in the continental US.
  • 2001: A Space Odyssey, not counting the space scenes, starts in Africa.
  • The Shining, set in Colorado (with exterior shots from Montana and Oregon).
  • Full Metal Jacket has Vietnam played by the (then derelict) London Docklands, and Parris Island played by both Bassingbourn Barracks in Bassingbourn, Cambridgeshire, and RAF Swinderby in Swinderby, Linconshire, as well as Epping Forest, Essex.
  • Eyes Wide Shut, set in Kubrick's birth town, New York City.
• Fury at Smuggler's Bay: Set in Southwest England but filmed in South Wales.
• Despite being set primarily in Scotland and New York, Highlander was filmed in Scotland and London.
• What a Girl Wants was filmed entirely in Britain, except for the flashback in Morocco. Yes, Britain stood in for America in the bookend scenes. Amanda Bynes's home in Chinatown, New York was really Borough Market in London.
• The outside shots of New York in Velvet Goldmine are clearly filmed in London, given that everybody is driving on the left and red double decker buses are driving around with advertisements for Les Misérables.
• The battle scenes in Braveheart were largely filmed in Ireland (a literal Scotireland, no less), possibly because rural Ireland is less heavily developed than the rural Scottish Lowlands, or as inaccessible and impractical as the Scottish Highlands. The Scottish filming took place in Glen Coe and Glen Nevis, which, depending on how strictly you hold the film to history, can be taken as doubling for other parts of Scotland.
• Return to Oz was entirely filmed in England. The Kansas scenes are actually located on Salisbury Plain.
• The Film of the Book The Spy Who Came in from the Cold was shot in very run-down early 1960s Dublin to stand in for Checkpoint Charlie and the various bombed-out back-alleys of East Berlin.
• Harry Potter:
  • Hogwarts is meant to be located in Scotland, but the movies were filmed almost entirely in England external shots of Hogwarts being mostly Alnwick Castle (only 45 mins drive from the border admittedly but still England). Hogwarts environs were sometimes filmed on location in Scotland and sometimes not. The Forbidden Forest and the Black Lake are located within short distances of each other in-universe, but they were filmed in Buckinghamshire and Highland respectively.
  • Sections of the sixth film that take place in England were filmed in Norway and Western Ireland.
  • This trope is played straighter in the Fantastic Beasts films. The first movie was set in New York City, but filmed entirely in England. The second movie likewise recreated Paris in England, with the New York backlot from the first movie revamped into a Parisian backlot. The Secrets of Dumbledore did aerial filming in Vietnam for China but kept up the tradition of using the UK to stand in for the US, Germany, and Bhutan. The climax was originally supposed to take place in Brazil instead of Bhutan and they had planned to travel there to film to avert this but the COVID-19 pandemic stopped them from being able to there film there and delayed production to the winter. They couldn’t recreate the location on the lot so they chose to re-work to Bhutan.
• Although the 1983 film The Lords Of Discipline, about elite military cadets and racism in their ranks, is set in the Southern US, most of the film was shot in England.
• For Captain America: The First Avenger, the Brooklyn scenes were shot in Manchester and Liverpool. Justified as the movie is set at the height of World War II, and both cities include pre-war architecture that resembled Brooklyn at this time. In Avengers: Age of Ultron, the scenes set in the fictional European nation of Sokovia were filmed in London. Averted for several other cities like Seoul, South Korea and Johannesburg, South Africa, which were shot on-location. Avengers: Endgame has Scotland (which appeared as itself in Avengers: Infinity War) doubling for the Jersey-located Camp Lehigh, the Norway settlement New Asgard, and a brief shot of New York City.
• An inversion happened in Who Framed Roger Rabbit, set in Hollywood but aside from some location shooting in LA, it was filmed in London (as the animation director refused to leave there and go to California, fearing bureaucracy from working close to the studio).
• In the Poirot TV film Murder on the Orient Express, scenes that were supposed to be in the French countryside were actually shot on the preserved Nene Valley Railway near Peterborough, England.
• The opening of Heaven's Gate showed the characters graduating from Harvard. Director Michael Cimino couldn't get permission to film at Harvard University itself. So he decided to film the scene at Oxford University in England despite that fact that Oxford looks nothing like Harvard.
• Many real pubs are used as stand-ins for The World's End's fictional ones, with the World's End itself portrayed by the Gardener's Arms in Letchworth. (However, other "pubs" in the film are actually cinemas, railway stations, etc.) Also, the "World's Oldest Roundabout" in the film really is that.
• Saving Private Ryan was filmed in Ireland and England, such as Ballinesker Beach, Curracole Strand, County Wexford, Ireland, stood in for Omaha Beach (noticeable by the fact it's only about ten or twenty yards long, as opposed to the 700+ yard long Omaha Beach), the former British Aerospace factory in Hatfield, Hedfordshire, England, was Ramelle, and Thame Park, Thame, Oxfordshire, England, was the machine gun nest, all shots of large fields and where the halftrack is ambushed, with some scenes filmed in London and Calvados, France.
• Edge of Tomorrow was filmed in the UK and does start there, but a majority of the film is actually set in the mainland of Western Europe, mostly France (the production did want to film on location in Normandy, but the studio preferred a beach built on a soundstage).
• The Pink Panther and its series avert this most of the time (i.e., filming on location), but A Shot in the Dark was specifically filmed in Borehamwood at MGM's British Studios. The biggest evidence of this is a scene where Inspector Clouseau runs through a room, out the window and into the Seine — which was just a large tank filled with thousands of gallons of water.
• Pokémon Detective Pikachu primarily uses real locations in London for the fictional Ryme City, modified with props and CGI to make them look like a part of the Pokémon universe. (As a side effect, this means cars in Ryme City drive on the left.) A lot of outdoor scenes outside the city limits were filmed in the Scottish Highlands, including Glen Nevis.
• How to Talk to Girls at Parties was set in Croydon, but filmed in Sheffield.
• X-Men: First Class: Englefield House in Reading, UK serves as the exterior for the Xavier mansion.
• Disenchanted (2022) takes place in upstate New York but was filmed in Dublin, Ireland. Incidentally, Amy Adams previously filmed Leap Day in Dublin.
• The Russia scenes in Black Widow (2021) were filmed in the UK.
• Superman IV: The Quest for Peace: Due to the poor budget, Superman IV was the only entry in the series that was shot entirely in the UK, shooting its Metropolis scenes in Milton Keynes, with the Kent farm recreated on farmland in Baldock, North Hertfordshire, despite the fact that the farm from the first film was still standing at the time.
• Despite Georgia's liberal tax breaks for TV and film production, Cocaine Bear, which is set in North Georgia and South Tennessee, was filmed in Wicklow, Ireland.
• Drop is set in Chicago but filmed entirely in Dublin, Ireland with Chicago skyscrapers added digitally. Most of the time this works fine since the film is almost entirely set at night and indoors utilizing two main locations (a fancy restaurant and the heroine's house) but it is much more obvious in the outdoors shots which include immediately identifiable Dublin landmarks like the Samuel Beckett Bridge or the Convention Centre Dublin.
• Warfare is set in Iraq, but mostly filmed at Bovington Airfield in England.

• Aylesbury Young Offenders Institute (prison for 18-21 year olds) gets work as Generic Prison Gate, with the original Victorian gatehouse, complete with wicket gate in the huge double doors.
• The BBC have used Ireland for the UK in a couple of productions, clearly for the tax breaks.
• Dublin, which has neither skyscrapers nor (surviving) Tudor buildings, has pretended to be New York for the film version of The Honeymooners and 16th century England for numerous episodes of The Tudors. In films Dublin has also doubled for Liverpool (Educating Rita and An Awfully Big Adventure), London (Peaches) and Boston (Far and Away).
• Romantic comedy-drama Cold Feet was set in a smart suburb of London; external filming was actually done in Stockport, a town two hundred miles away Oop North, whose smarter residential suburb of Heaton Moor was held to be a good double for the sort of London the characters lived in. The advantages for a London based TV company probably boiled down to it being much cheaper, with less traffic, on a main railway line out of London, and evolved enough (by the primitive standards of the north of England) to have a couple of very nice coffee shops and eateries - home from home, in fact.
• Dalziel and Pascoe: Based in the books that were set in Yorkshire, but produced by the BBC's Pebble Mill Studios in Birmingham (which did a lot of BBC dramas and Current Affairs in the 90's). As a result various places in the Midlands ended up standing in for Yorkshire towns and cities, and the Cotswolds in Gloucestershire played the part of the Yorkshire Dales, probably because they were only an hour's drive away from Birmingham as opposed to three.
• Doc Martin: The fictional Portwenn is played by Cornish village Port Isaac.
• Doctor Who:
  • The ever-dependable BBC Quarry somewhere in England or Wales, doubling for an alien planet or rocky desert, was a filming staple in the classic era of the show, to the point it was given a Leaning on the Fourth Wall lampshade once or twice.
  • Even when the Classic show was set on Earth, it would generally call upon the Home Counties to double for overseas locations, or even British locations further from London:
    • The show's first ever location filming in "The Reign of Terror" featured a road in Buckinghamshire doubling for Revolutionary France.
    • Frensham Common in Surrey was called on to do this twice, as a battlefield on the outskirts of ancient Troy in The Myth Makers" and as Culloden Moor in the Scottish Highlands in The Highlanders".
    • In "The Abominable Snowmen", the series ventures a bit further afield, using the North Wales mountain pass at Nant Ffrancon to double for Tibet.
    • In The Enemy of the World", Climping Beach, near Littlehampton in Sussex, doubles for the Australian coast.
    • In "The War Games", all location filming was conducted in Sussex, near Brighton, and was meant to represent a variety of battlefields in overseas locations like World War I trenches in France, the Ancient Roman Empire, and The American Civil War. Or at least, fake versions of them on an alien planet.
    • Sussex doubles for the Scottish Highlands in "Terror of the Zygons".
    • A quarry in Surrey doubles for Antarctica in "The Seeds of Doom".
    • "The Masque of Mandragora" also ventures further afield than normal, using Portmeirion village in North Wales to double for Renaissance Italy.
  • As the new series is being produced by BBC Wales, Cardiff has California doubled for London several times. Cardiff quayside is nearly always the setting for any urban filming.
  • Ironically, in "The Unquiet Dead", Victorian Cardiff was California Doubled by Swansea, a smaller city nearby — this was due to Cardiff being heavily bombed in World War II, so not many Victorian buildings survived.
  • Caerphilly Castle in Wales has stood in for various other castles and fortified structures in episodes as wildly different as "The End of Time", "The Vampires of Venice", "Nightmare in Silver", "The Day of the Doctor", "Robot of Sherwood" and even "Heaven Sent".
  • 2012 Christmas special "The Snowmen" had various parts of the 19th century old town in Bristol stand in for parts of 1890s London. This was both due to the more convenient distance and due to the fact that most of contemporary London lacks the late-Victorian street look and even continuity of Victorian buildings that Bristol still has in a few places.
  • Bafflingly enough, Series 6's "The Impossible Astronaut" had its Utah diner scenes filmed at Eddie's American Diner in Cardiff. For a time, it had become a tourist hotspot for Whovians, and has had its bathroom doors painted to resemble a TARDIS. To the surprise of everyone, that same diner interior makes a comeback in Series 9, though its true nature (and why its exterior shots are now set in Nevada instead) is not what anyone was expecting.
  • Some of Series 8's coastal or beach scenes (which occur in a few episodes) were filmed at different parts of the Welsh coastline. Funnily enough, one of these beaches is supposed to be located on an alien planet colonised by humans in the future. One Bristol-centric episode set in the present day was mostly filmed there, but has railway-related scenes that were shot elsewhere in The West Country.
• Parodied by The Fast Show in the Shore Leave sketch. The sailors start singing that they are in New York in what is clearly Newcastle.
• In Foreign Affairs (1966), the exterior scenes of the Soviet Embassy were filmed at the home of Bob Monkhouse.
• A quarry in Cornwall played the planet Magrathea in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1981).
• House of Cards (UK) indulged in doubling, using Manchester Town Hall for The Houses of Parliament internal shots. This was half because the town hall was designed to be a perfect replica of parliament in some areas, and partially because getting permits and time to film in the actual parliament buildings is problematic at best.
• Double subverted on one episode of James May's Toy Stories, where James tries to fly a balsawood toy glider across the English channel. Due to international flight regulations, he has to settle for flying the equivalent distance across the sea from England to Wales instead, and briefly discusses having some Welshmen dress up in mustaches and accordions. When that flight fails due to weather conditions, he instead - successfully - flies it from the English coast to the island of Lundy, which he renames Llundy to make it sound more Welsh.
• Into the Badlands is set in a far-future post-apocalyptic North America, with locations covering the current central United States. The first season was filmed in Louisiana, but the rest of the production was moved to Ireland.
• Fun with ''Morse'' - see if you can spot the real Oxford locations (usually the famous bits) and which are Stevenage in North Herts.
• Outlander's mid-20th century Inverness is mostly Falkland in Fife, because the real Inverness has had far too much development in the sixties and later to pass for the 1940s.
• In Robin of Sherwood England doubled for England, just not the same bits of it. Sherwood Forest was mostly represented by a wood outside Bristol, Nottingham Castle by various northern castles and Wells Cathedral, and other locations were scattered across the country, mostly in the north and west.
• The Sandman was filmed in London and the south of England. The scenes set in London were actually filmed in London, but so was a sequence set in Newcastle and another supposedly taking place in Buffalo, New York. For the episodes set in Florida, they went all the way out to Poole in Dorset. For the Cereal Convention, supposedly taking place at a hotel in Georgia, it was back to London; the hotel is one of those serving London Heathrow Airport.
• Secret Invasion has all of the episode one location filming in the UK (Leeds, Huddersfield and Halifax in West Yorkshire) to double for Moscow. Specifically, the location of the climax is a notable building called the Piece Hall[1] in Halifax.
• As Sherlock is also produced by BBC Wales, Cardiff has doubled for parts of London in that show as well. However, location shoots requiring distinct London or Devonshire scenery were shot in the corresponding places, averting this trope. (The Devonshire village seen in one episode is still actually Welsh, though.)
• Talamasca: The Secret Order: Manchester doubled for New York City.
• One of the "Discoverers" sketches in That Mitchell and Webb Look has the captain and his first mate land on the shores of Australia... given the nature of the show, the sheer flagrancy of the doubling makes it all the funnier when you have one of the most iconically British landmarks in the background, viz, the cliffs of Dover.
• In The Tomorrow People (1973): "Worlds Away", on arriving for the first time on an alien planet, one character warns the others, "This isn't just some wood in Surrey," which is Lampshade Hanging by the writers — the scene was indeed filmed in a wood in the British county of Surrey.
• The BBC drama Traces is set in Dundee. Apart from a few scenes featuring well-known Dundonian landmarks such as the statue of Desperate Dan from outside the DC Thomson offices, it was filmed in Bolton, Greater Manchester.
• The Train Now Standing...: In-Universe, Burberry Halt is a station on the former Great Western Railway, placing it somewhere in the West of England, but location filming was done at Bodiam station in East Sussex, which is in the South East of England.
• Many ITC Entertainment spy shows of The '60s, such as Danger Man, The Saint and Man in a Suitcase had protagonists that travelled all over the world on missions and cases, but were restricted to filming in the UK, and therefore had to make frequent use of this trope.

• A rather odd, yet strangely hilarious, inversion: Zombieland has quite a bit of its running time set in Hollywood, including a major movie star's mansion and a theme park. So both of those scenes were, quite naturally, filmed in Georgia.
• The Blind Side is set in Memphis, Tennessee but was filmed in Atlanta, Georgia.
• In X-Men: First Class, the small island near Cuba is actually Georgia's Jekyll Island with some palm trees.
• Most of the Marvel Cinematic Universe movies, starting with the 2014 production of Ant-Man, have been filmed in the Atlanta area, primarily at Trilith Studios in Fayette County, Georgia (about 20 miles south of Atlanta). Anything that isn't filmed in the studio itself is done in various locations in the Atlanta area. The downtown area stands in for New York City, Piedmont Park for Central Park, and the Avengers' headquarters (at least the exterior) is part of Porsche's (as in the automobile) North American headquarters just south of the city. They film some on actual locations, but the bulk of it is done in Atlanta.
  • In Captain America: Civil War, Atlanta doubled for Lagos, Nigeria.
  • In an inversion of traditional "California doubling for another city," Ant-Man and Ant-Man and the Wasp have Atlanta doubling for San Francisco.
  • In Black Panther, the scenes in Oakland were shot in Atlanta, along with some scenes taking place in London and South Korea. Atlanta City Hall doubles for the United Nations building. The High Museum of Art doubles for the "Museum of Great Britain".
• Roadtrip is supposed to be set in Ithaca, New York; however, the film was mostly shot in Georgia, primarily around Atlanta and Athens on the campuses of Georgia Tech, Emory University, and the University of Georgia. One of the college tour scenes was filmed in Sanford Stadium with UGA's "G" logo visible on the field.
• Now and Then was set in Indiana, but shot entirely in Georgia in Savannah and Statesboro.
• Both The Divergent Series: Insurgent and The Divergent Series: Allegiant were shot in Atlanta for the scenes outside Chicago.
• Due to Creator Provincialism, Shane Black is prone to setting his scripts\movies in Los Angeles. However, The Nice Guys employed an inverted California Doubling, as the 1970s L.A. was mostly filmed in Atlanta.
• The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 1 and Part 2 have Atlanta double for Appalachia.
• In Furious 7 the scenes set in Los Angeles were filmed in Atlanta.
• A Loud House Christmas has Atlanta double for the fictional Royal Woods, Michigan. There's also a scene where Lincoln and Clyde film a Miami Beach attack near a lake at Royal Woods, which means that for that scene, Atlanta doubled for Royal Woods, which doubles for Miami.
• SHAZAM! Fury of the Gods has Atlanta doubling for Philadelphia.
• I, Tonya was shot entirely in Georgia, primarily around Atlanta and in Macon at the Macon Coliseum (which doubled for La halle de glace Olympique in Albertville, France and the CC Amfi in Hamar, Norway).
• Civil War is, in part, a Deadly Road Trip movie set in New York, Washington D.C., and the hundreds of miles of rural areas between both cities. It was filmed primarily in Atlanta, which is quite obvious during the opening scene that's supposed to be somewhere in Manhattan but is clearly Auburn Avenue in Downtown Atlanta, right near the I-285 highway.

• Cobra Kai takes place in the San Fernando Valley in California, like its predecessor film series The Karate Kid. While the Karate Kid movies were filmed on location in the Los Angeles area, Cobra Kai was shot in Atlanta. The Atlanta suburbs of Union City, Douglasville, Marietta, and Alpharetta stand in for Reseda, Encino, Panorama City, Sylmar and Northridge. The strip mall in Reseda where Cobra Kai is located is actually in Sylvan Hills. While it’s mostly convincing, there are parts of the series that don’t look like California (such as multiple scenes where autumn leaves can be seen on the ground and everyone's dressed for the cooler weather of Atlanta).
• Constantine:
  • The series was filmed in Atlanta, and the show partially averts the trope by having three episodes set in Atlanta proper. "A Feast of Friends" in particular prominently features two Atlanta landmarks, the Fernbank Museum of Natural History and the Fox Theatre. However, Constantine, Chas, and Zed go all around the United States, and one point, Mexico, to quell paranormal activity, and for every location outside Atlanta, the show plays the trope straight.
  • The Ford Buildings on the campus of Berry College in northwest Georgia doubled for Ravenscar Asylum in Northern England. The exterior shots of Constantine's millhouse hideout were also filmed on the campus of Berry College.
• Drop Dead Diva has Atlanta doubling for Los Angeles.
• Halt and Catch Fire is set in the Silicon Prairie of the DFW Metroplex but is filmed in Atlanta. AMC considered filming the series in North Texas; however, AMC already had crew in place in Atlanta for The Walking Dead, and Georgia has more generous tax breaks for TV/film production than Texas. Season 3 sees a shift in setting from Dallas to San Francisco; however, filming stayed primarily in the Atlanta area, although a scene with Joe jogging near the Golden Gate Bridge was shot on location there.
• Necessary Roughness is set in Long Island, New York but filmed in Atlanta; the Georgia Dome, the Falcons' then-home stadium, served as the stadium for the New York Hawks.
• Stranger Things:
  • Hawkins, Indiana is represented by Jackson, Georgia, roughly halfway between Atlanta and Macon. Notably, the choice of setting was motivated by this trope. It was originally titled Montauk and set in the real-life Long Island town of that name, with the setting meant to have an Amity Island feel to it. However, their budget didn't allow them to film in a location that could double for that sort of Northeastern coastal town, while suburban Georgia, with that state's generous tax breaks, could easily double for an Amblin-esque Everytown, America setting.
  • The largely vacant Gwinnett Place Mall in Duluth, Georgia doubles as the Starcourt Mall in Season 3 with several period-accurate storefronts. Incidentally, Gwinnett Place actually opened in 1984, lending further credence to the show's 80s setting.
• WandaVision: Westview, New Jersey is represented by various locations in both Atlanta and Los Angeles.
  • The atrium of the Georgia World Congress Center is used for scenes set at SWORD headquarters.
  • The neighborhood in "The All-New Halloween Spooktacular" where Vision meets Agnes is a real community in Williamson, Georgia; Rolling Hill Drive is the name of the actual road, while "Ellis Avenue" (which is the original border of the Hex) is a re-signing of Williamson Zebulon Road.
• In an inversion, She-Hulk: Attorney at Law is set mostly in Los Angeles but was filmed in Atlanta.

• Wilmington stands in for Detroit in The Crow (1994).
• North Carolina was the primary filming location in Iron Man 3; the Malibu and Miami scenes were all shot in the Wilmington area, while the Rose Hill, Tennessee scenes were shot in the Charlotte area, mostly in Mooresville.
• The Hunger Games sets District 12 in Appalachia, but the movie was filmed outside Wilmington, North Carolina, on the coast.
• North Carolina stands in for eastern Long Island in Weekend at Bernie's.
• Muppets From Space has Wilmington, North Carolina standing in for what is presumed to be Northeastern coastal suburbia.
• The Adventures of Elmo in Grouchland was shot in Wilmington, North Carolina, doubling for New York City (for the main setting of Sesame Street) and the fictional Grouchland.
• North Carolina stands in for Central Florida in Paper Towns.
• The film adaptation of Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret. was filmed in North Carolina, despite being set in New York and New Jersey.
• Scream (2022) is still set in a fictional California city, but was filmed in Wilmington.

• The Netflix miniseries Florida Man is set in Florida but was filmed in and around Wilmington, North Carolina.
• Hightown has been filmed in Wilmington, North Carolina since season 2 but is still set in Provincetown, Massachusetts.
• Season 1 of Revolution, set in a post-apocalyptic Illinois, was filmed in and around Wilmington, North Carolina. Filming moved to the Austin, Texas area for the second season.
• The Summer I Turned Pretty: The beach house is in Cousins, Massachusetts, while in the second season Conrad attends Brown University, which is located in Providence, Rhode Island, but both are filmed in North Carolina.
• Under the Dome is set in Maine but is filmed in Southport, Wilmington, and Burgaw, North Carolina.
• Welcome to Flatch is set in Ohio, but is filmed in Burgaw, North Carolina, near Wilmington.

• Battle: Los Angeles was set in Los Angeles, as per the title, but was filmed in Shreveport and Baton Rouge.
• Because of Winn-Dixie takes place in Florida, but was filmed in Napoleonville and Gibson, Louisiana.
• Fantastic Four (2015) was shot mostly in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. They even brought in authentic-looking New York buses to try and add to the illusion.
• In a rather localized take, The Expendables have their base of operations in New Orleans, but scenes set there were principally filmed in downtown Baton Rouge, with the distinctive Louisiana State Capitol building visible in a major establishing shot.
• Geostorm takes place around the world, but was mostly shot in New Orleans.
• Crossroads (2002) is mostly set during a road trip across the southern U.S., but was mostly filmed in Louisiana (the film's star Britney Spears hails from the state). Averted with some parts of the film, which actually take place in Louisiana.
• American Ultra takes place in multiple locations around the world, but was filmed in and around New Orleans.
• Five Feet Apart is mostly set inside the fictional Saint Grace's Hospital in a un-named city, but was filmed in New Orleans, Louisiana.
• Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters was filmed in New Orleans, Louisiana and Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada doubling for various locations, with the long-abandoned Six Flags New Orleans portraying an amusement park.
• A portion of Jurassic World was filmed in Louisiana, with some filming done at the abandoned Six Flags New Orleans.
• Dawn of the Planet of the Apes is set in San Francisco and its surroundings, while being primarily shot in both Louisiana and Vancouver.
• The Iron Claw, mostly set in Dallas, Texas, was filmed in Baton Rouge.

• Outside of a few exterior shots, the bulk of Memphis Beat was shot in New Orleans.
• Zoo takes place in various American cities and assorted international locations. The series is shot in New Orleans.
• The TV movie The Deadly Tower, about the Charles Whitman snipings, was filmed in Louisiana because the University of Texas (where the killings took place) understandably wouldn't let production take place there.
• The first two seasons of Scream: The TV Series were shot in Louisiana, doubling for the fictional Lakewood, though production moved to Georgia after the second.
• Hap and Leonard takes place in east Texas, but was filmed in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
• On Becoming a God in Central Florida mostly takes place in the Greater Orlando area in Florida, but was shot in Louisiana.
• Salem is set in Salem, Massachusetts, but is mostly filmed in Shreveport, Louisiana.

• Twelve Strong: One of many films where New Mexico doubles for Afghanistan.
• Due Date: Scenes that are supposed to be in Dallas are obviously in a desert with prominent mountains in the background.
• Half Brothers: Scenes supposedly in Illinois and Oklahoma are obviously in the desert and show mountains in the background. One scene in Missouri has the New Mexico Rail Runner train with its’ very distinctive livery go by right behind them.
• Hell or High Water: One of many films where New Mexico doubles for Texas.
• Lone Survivor has New Mexico doubling for Afghanistan.
• A Million Ways to Die in the West has New Mexico doubling for the fictional Old Stump, Arizona.
• Red Dawn (1984): The town of Calumet was actually Las Vegas, New Mexico and other scenes were filmed in the surrounding mountains and on the Eastern New Mexico Plains. One memorable scene was filmed at Ghost Ranch.
• Whiskey Tango Foxtrot: All the scenes in Afghanistan are filmed in New Mexico with Laguna Pueblo doubling for a small Afghan village.
• Sicario: Scenes in Arizona and parts of rural Mexico are filmed in New Mexico.
• Sicario: Day of the Soldado: is an even more egregious example as scenes which are supposed to take place in Corpus Christi Texas and other areas along the Texas Gulf Coast prominently show desert and mountains.
• The Marksman is supposed to take place along the Mexican border in Arizona but many scenes clearly show the Sandia mountains next to Albuquerque in the background. It should be noted that most locations in Arizona along the border look nothing like the high Desert of Central New Mexico.
• Did You Hear About The Morgans? is about a couple who are put into the Witness Protection Program and sent to Wyoming. The film was mostly shot in New Mexico.

• Briarpatch takes place in Texas, but was filmed in New Mexico.
• The Cleaning Lady takes place in Las Vegas, but was filmed in Albuquerque.
• Longmire: Both the TV and Book series take place in Wyoming, but are filmed in New Mexico.
• The Night Shift takes place in San Antonio, Texas but was filmed in Albuquerque.
• Waco, a miniseries about the stand off with the Branch Davidians in Waco, Texas, was filmed near Santa Fe, New Mexico.
• The Really Loud House and its Halloween special, A Really Haunted Loud House, have Albuquerque double for the fictional Royal Woods, Michigan.

• Charly (2002): Exterior scenes that take place in New York City were filmed in downtown Salt Lake City.
• Most of John Ford's Westerns were shot in the Monument Valley of Utah, including the Cavalry Trilogy, which was set mostly in Arizona, The Searchers, which was set in Texas, and Cheyenne Autumn, which took place in Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska and Wyoming.
• Some of the Nevada scenes in Independence Day were filmed in Utah, specifically in Wendover and the Bonneville Salt Flats.
• Footloose is set in the fictional town of Bomont in a unspecified Middle America state, but was shot in Utah County, Utah, with filming done in American Fork, Payson, Vineyard, Provo and Lehi (with the prominent Lehi Roller Mills grain towers seen at several points). At the time, the film was often mistakenly listed by media sources as taking place in Utah.
• Star Trek (2009) shot its Vulcan scenes in the deserts of Utah
• The Mars scenes in John Carter were filmed in Utah.
• The alien planet scenes in Galaxy Quest were filmed in Goblin Valley State Park.
• Salt Lake City stood in for Albuquerque (which, ironically, later became a regular locale associated with this trope) in High School Musical. This is referenced in the High School Musical: The Musical: The Series spinoff, a Recursive Canon in which HSM is a fictional film series. The show is set in the same city where the films were shot, meaning Salt Lake City.
• In a reversal of the trope's namesake, Revenge Of The Ninja takes place in Los Angeles, but was filmed in Salt Lake City, Utah.

• Touched by an Angel takes place in an Everytown, America setting, but was filmed entirely in Salt Lake City.

• Chronicle is set in Seattle, but was mostly shot in Cape Town.
• Doomsday uses mostly South Africa to stand in for post-apocalyptic Scotland.
• Ernest in the Army starts in Valdosta, Georgia and sets much of its plot in the Middle East, but was filmed in Cape Town.
• Escape Room and its sequel were set in Chicago and New York respectively, but were both shot mostly in Cape Town, South Africa.
• Like two out of the first three movies in the series, Home Alone 4: Taking Back the House was set in Chicago, but unlike them, it was filmed in Cape Town.
• Hooded Angels: Johannesburg, South Africa stands in as several fictional places within Texas.
• Howling IV: The Original Nightmare is set in California, but is shot in South Africa.
• Killer Body Count: The film is set somewhere in Canada. However, it was filmed in Cape Town, South Africa.
• The Kissing Booth and its sequels are set in Los Angeles, but were mostly shot in Cape Town (although some scenes were shot in LA).
• The 2009 remake of The Last House on the Left was shot in South Africa.
• The Last Days of American Crime is set in Detroit, but was mostly shot in Cape Town and Johannesburg.
• Prisoners of the Lost Universe is set in California but shot in South Africa, a fact made obvious when vehicles are shown left hand driving.
• Queen of Katwe: Scenes set in Russia were filmed in Johannesburg, South Africa.
• Racing Stripes takes place in Kentucky (although the specific locality is not named, it's likely Florence or an adjacent town, as the nearby horse racing track Turfway Park is named), but was filmed in and around Pietermaritzburg.
• The TV movie Spring Break Shark Attack, set in Miami, was filmed in Cape Town, South Africa.
• The two German-produced The Three Investigators movies, The Three Investigators and the Secret of Skeleton Island and The Three Investigators and the Secret of Terror Castle, had California be played by South Africa. This trope was partially averted in the first movie, however, most of which is indeed set in or off the coast of South Africa.
• Tiger House is set in England, but was shot in South Africa.
• In the 2018 Tomb Raider movie, scenes set in Hong Kong and on the island of Yamatai were mostly shot in South Africa.

• Beaver Falls is about three British teenagers who get to work at the title summer camp in California. There are at least three real places in the US called Beaver Falls, exactly none of which are in California - and in the case of the camp, California was played by South Africa (and few if any of the "Americans", this being a British-Canadian-South African co-production, were played by actual Americans).
• Black Sails has Cape Town filling in for New Providence, in the Bahamas, for outdoor and water scenes.
• The first season of 15th-century Florence-set Leonardo was filmed in South Africa.
• A portion of season 3 of Outlander, which primarily takes place in the US, was filmed in South Africa.
• SAF3, set in Malibu, California, was filmed in Cape Town.
• Strike Back has South Africa standing in for a wide variety of (sub)tropical locations. The trope is inverted in the opening episode of Shadow Warfare when Scott and Winchester are shown driving motorcycles along a road in "Northern California," but lane markings, roadside reflectors, etc. are ones not found in the US.
• Troy: Fall of a City takes place in Ancient Greece and was filmed in South Africa.

• The rocky isle of Filfla, South of Malta, was used for no less than three different adaptations of The Count of Monte Cristo as the fictional Isle of Monte Cristo (which is supposed to be off the West coasts of Italy), namely the 1998 miniseries, the 2002 film and the 2024 miniseries.

• Parodied in one Wonder Woman comic. When the titular heroine is watching a hypothetical film based on her life, one of her many, many complaints is how much Paradise Island shamelessly resembles Florida.

• The End of the World series: An in-universe example; while watching a Capitol soap opera about a detective in District 4, Haymitch notes that the seashore looks suspiciously like the Capitol lake.

• Amreeka has Winnipeg doubling for Illinois. Averted for the scenes set in Ramallah, which were actually shot on location there.
• The Philippines doubled for Vietnam in Apocalypse Now and a biker film called The Losers. The Philippines are also a particularly favorite country for a lot of low-budget Hong Kong movies to double for the US and other countries, due to the different kinds of urban cities, beaches and deep jungles.
• All of the Spanish scenes in Are You Being Served? were filmed on a stage at Elstree Studios. Trevor Bannister recalled:
  When we heard that the story took place in Spain, we all thought, "Oh, lovely, we're all going to go to Spain and do some filming". Did we hell? But it was a lot of fun.
• For Atomic Blonde, most of the shooting took place in Berlin and the film is set there, but some of the Berlin scenes were also shot in Budapest.
• Big Game (2014), despite being made by Finns, has Bavaria doubling for Finland, as it has plot-important mountains and woodlands real-life Finland notoriously lacks.
• Black Death takes place in medieval England but was filmed entirely in eastern Germany.
• The Black Demon takes place in an oil rig off the shore of Mexico, but was filmed in the Dominican Republic.
• Both the 1949 and 1980 movie versions of The Blue Lagoon were partially shot in Fiji, where it doubled as the remote island depicted in the book. Nevertheless, the majority of both films were filmed in studio settings. Specifically, the 1949 movie included scenes shot at the Pinewood Studios, while the 1980 rendition featured segments filmed at the Warner Bros. Burbank Studios.
• The Bourne Ultimatum had a scene set in Moscow during the events of The Bourne Supremacy (which was filmed in Moscow during that film). To avoid having to get an entire crew to Moscow again, they created a snowy Moscow in East Berlin, which was mostly rebuilt by Stalin and so looked much like the architecture of Moscow.
• The Philippines doubled for Thailand in Brokedown Palace.
• In Captain America: Civil War, Berlin doubles for Vienna (the building shown as the exterior of the signing of the Sokovia Accords is Sony Center) and Bucharest (shot around Messe and Zentralomnibusbahnhof).
• Challengers (2024) has parts set in New Rochelle, New York and Atlanta, Georgia that were filmed in the Boston, Massachusetts area. Wheaton College in Norton, Massachusetts stands in for Stanford University in Palo Alto, California.
• Cold Mountain was filmed in Romania but set in Western North Carolina. The director stated that the reason for shooting there was a lack of high-quality, old-growth forests and period buildings in WNC. It could also have been the prevalence of cell towers in the area.
• Inverted in the film Crash (2004), which was set in LA, but filmed many of its exterior shots in Germany because it was German-financed. There's also a short-lived Crash series, which continued the tradition by using Albuquerque for LA.
• While most of the film was shot in the Philippines, the Australian Made-for-TV drama film A Dangerous Life has some of its scenes shot in Sri Lanka and Australia largely due to legal and political pressure from Juan Ponce Enrile who took umbrage to the way he was portrayed in the film.
• Defiance (the Daniel Craig Holocaust movie) is mostly shot in Eastern Europe relatively close to the area of Belarus where it's set. However, parts of the movie are also set in rural Manitoba, Canada and local plant life like red willow and Manitoba hardy roses are visible in many shots. Interestingly one of the reasons the region was initially settled by a lot of Eastern European immigrants is that it apparently looked a lot like home to them as well.
• The film Dog Soldiers featured Luxembourg doubling for the Highlands of Scotland.
• The Expendables has a lot of scenes shot in Bulgaria. For one, the presidential residence in Boyana, near Sofia and right next to the Boyana Film studio, doubled as Moscow.
• Field of Dreams:
  • Dubuque, Iowa filled in for most of non-Fenway Park Boston. The gas station where Ray gets Terrence Mann's address was located at 3rd and Locust Streets ^note  (the gas station was torn down years ago and is now a parking lot), and Terrence's neighborhood was located around 17th Street and Central Avenue in Dubuque.
  • Both Galena, Illinois and Dyersville, Iowa filled in for Chisholm, Minnesota as both towns were within a 50-mile radius of the farm that served as the Kinsella home.
  • Most of the road trip scenes were filmed in rural Dubuque County, Iowa and Jo Daviess County in Illinois. US Highways 61, 151, 52, and 20 along with some state and local roads stood in for the various highways Kinsella and Mann traveled over.
• Flodder in Amerika!: According to the making-of featurette, most outdoor scenes were shot on location in New York City, but the in-door scenes in Mr. Rosenbaum's club were shot in a studio in the Netherlands. Jon Polito was flown in for his part.
• For rather obvious reasons, countries with current or past socialist governments often end up being California Doubled, especially in works made during the days of the Eastern Bloc:
  • Vienna doubled for Moscow in Firefox and Bratislava in The Living Daylights.
  • Helsinki, Finland has a reputation as standing in for Moscow in many American films, such as Reds and Gorky Park.
  • Surprisingly not the case in Red Heat - Budapest played Moscow for most of the movie, but the establishing footage behind the opening and closing credits really was shot in Moscow, including St. Basil's Cathedral, Vladimir Lenin's tomb, the Kremlin walls, the obligatory Lenin and Karl Marx statues and the steel sculpture Worker and Kolkhoz Woman.
  • Doctor Zhivago used different Spanish locations (especially in the province of Soria) for Siberia. Soria, as well as among others La Pedriza and La Ciudad Encantada, have also doubled as Cimmeria in the first Conan the Barbarian (1982) movie. Interestingly, the makers of Doctor Zhivago actually tried to get permission to film in the Soviet Union.
  • The producers of Fiddler on the Roof scouted locations across Eastern Europe but finally settled on Yugoslavia (largely because they couldn't get permission to film in other countries).
  • War and Peace (1956) was filmed in Italy.
  • The Unbearable Lightness of Being, set during the Prague Spring, was filmed in France and Switzerland, as communist Czechoslovakia still existed at the time. Ironically, the Czech Republic would later become a frequent target of this trope.
  • A rare, pre-glasnost exception is a 1976 adaptation of The Blue Bird, which was the first ever International Coproduction between the U.S. and Soviet Union. The movie was filmed in English, on location in Moscow and Leningrad (present-day St. Petersburg). It ended up being a Troubled Production due to the language and culture barriers, in addition to Jane Fonda annoying the Russian crew by following them around and constantly talking about communism.
  • This was inverted by Amadeus, which is set in Vienna, but was filmed in Prague. This is because the film is a Period Piece and socialist-era Prague could easily pass for 18th-century Vienna due to it still having a lot of buildings typical of European cities during that century.
  • Movies set in Tibet have been filmed in the mountains of Argentina and Morocco.
  • Belgrade, Serbia has doubled for Moscow in several movies, including The November Man, Anna and Despite The Falling Snow.
  • Rocky IV: The training scenes set in Russia were actually filmed in Wyoming; the farm is located in Jackson Hole, and most of the exterior shots were filmed in the Grand Teton National Park. The fight itself was shot at the Agrodome at Hastings Park in Vancouver, British Columbia.
• F.I.S.T. had Dubuque, Iowa filling in for Cleveland, as it was said to look more like Cleveland of the 1930s than Cleveland itself did due to the near total absence of television antennas in Dubuque during the 1970s. It particuarly resembeled Cleveland in the part of Dubuque that locals call the "North End." Dubuque's geography made receiving over the air television signals problematic for most area residents, so a cable television system was developed in the 1950s, well before most other localities had implemented their own cable TV systems.
• Guyana: Crime of the Century: The scenes taking place in the settlement of Johnsontown, Guyana were filmed in Mexico.
• The film version of Hello, Dolly! used Garrison, New York as 1890s-era Yonkers. Many of the buildings they redecorated for the film are still there.
• Interstellar: Iceland's glaciers, highlands and coastal shallows were used for filming the different environments of the three extrasolar planets visited during the course of the storyline.
• Ivan the Terrible was shot in the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic at Mosfilm's substantial production facility of Alma-Ata (now Almaty), instead of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic since the film is set at the beginning of Tsarist Russia (the production had been moved there due to the German army reaching the outskirts of Moscow in late 1941).
• Jacob's Ladder had Puerto Rico double for Vietnam,
• The James Bond series has several "Other country doubling":
  • Most subaquatic scenes since Thunderball (1965) were shot in The Bahamas, thus doubling for Florida's coast in the climax.
  • On Her Majesty's Secret Service (1969) features Piz Gloria. A mountain that is set near St. Moritz, Switzerland in the novel. However, in the film, the mountain and surrounding areas are in the Bernese Oberland (which is in the same country), with several large signs naming places like "Murren", "Vengen", "Lauterbrunnen" and "Schilthornbahn". Additionally, the bobsled run (now a ski run) that Bond chases Blofeld down near the end is a few miles away from the real Piz Gloria, so jumping out of the building and rolling down the hill to end up at it is impossible.
    • Later in the film, Tracy states that the closest post office to them is in Feldkirch, Austria. However, she takes him to a phone booth in Lauterbrunnen, Switzerland instead. it is unknown if they are meant to be in Feldkirch by this point due to James ultimately using the phone booth rather than a post office, as well as the fact that the village is lined by several very obvious Swiss flags that could easily have been removed for filming.
    • Portugal is also used for filming in the opening and closing scenes. However, due to the Corsican Marc-Ange Draco being located here, as well as the fact that everyone in the hotel speaks French, it seems to be standing in for Corsica.
  • Diamonds Are Forever (1971) mostly averts this as a good chunk of it was actually filmed in Las Vegas. However the scene where Bond is riding the elevator to Whyte's penthouse was filmed in Pinewood Studios. And the first scene with Mr. Wint and Mr. Kidd which took place in the South African desert was shot within the Vegas city limits.
  • In The Man with the Golden Gun (1974), Scaramanga's island is located within Chinese territorial waters, but is filmed on an island in the Phang Nga Bay off the coast of Thailand, on the opposite side of the Malay Straits. Obviously, it would have been impossible to film in Communist China in 1974, let alone one where they're depicted working with a foreign assassin.
  • Moonraker (1979) has an amusing case, where to justify French locations in what is said to be California, they say Hugo Drax purchased a castle in France and moved it brick by brick to his estate.
  • In GoldenEye, Cuba is actually Puerto Rico, the Russian dam from the opening is in Switzerland, and many St. Petersburg externals are in London. The train scenes were filmed on the Nene Valley Railway in Cambridgeshire, also the scene of filming for the circus train scene in Octopussy.
  • Tomorrow Never Dies is partially set in Vietnam, but given the Vietnamese authorities vetoed shortly before filming, the crew actually filmed in Thailand (some scenes even denounce the backgrounds are the same as in The Man with the Golden Gun).
  • The car chase in For Your Eyes Only is shot in Corfu, Greece, but the locals that help Bond flip his car the right way up can be heard speaking Spanish, and Bond says "Por favor" to ask them for help with getting it started.
    • Similarly, the "warehouse" that Bond chases Locque through is shot in the Old Fortress, Corfu, though it is doubling for Albania. Funnily enough, the real Albania is so close by that you can see it from the fortress.
  • Die Another Day: North Korea and Cuba are communist nations who understandably wouldn't want to be involved with the Cold Warrior, so they used Hawaii and Cornwall for the former and Spain for the latter.
  • In Casino Royale, Madagascar is the Bahamas, and Montenegro is the Czech Republic.
  • No Time to Die:
    • Bond goes to Santiago de Cuba at one point. No filming for these scenes took place in Cuba, rather in Jamaica and at Pinewood Studios.
    • The filming of the climax on the Big Bad's island (implied to be one of the Kuril Islands, claimed by both Russia and Japan) took place on the Faroe Islands, northwest of the UK.
• Hawaii doubles for a Central American island in Jurassic Park, the Amazon in both the first and fourth Indiana Jones movies and The Rundown (the crew of the latter planned to film in Brazil, but gave up after getting robbed there), Panama in Godzilla (1998) (leading future productions shot in Oahu to hide a giant footprint), Florida in Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, Okinawa Island in The Karate Kid Part II (although some scenes were filmed on-location), and Africa in Tears of the Sun.
• Indiana Jones does this a lot. Egypt from Raiders of the Lost Ark was really Tunisia, the primary shooting location for Tatooine in the Star Wars original trilogy (the canyon where Indy threatens Belloq is the same location where R2-D2 was taken by Jawas in A New Hope). Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom is set in India, but shot in Sri Lanka, due to both the locations being very apart in India (but close to each other in the island) and the Indian government getting offended by their portrayal. The first act of Temple of Doom, set in 1935 Shanghai, was filmed in Macau.
• Lethal Weapon 3, which is set in Los Angeles, inverts it with the first scene, the car bomb scene, by filming the outdoor shots for the scene in Orlando, Florida. The building that was destroyed, the ICSI Building, was actually Orlando's old City Hall. They put a Coca-Cola sign on the new City Hall. They also cast the city's mayor at the time, Bill Frederick, as "Policeman who says 'Bravo' after explosion". And the building that was destroyed in The Stinger was located in St. Petersburg, Florida
• Little Sweetheart is based off of a book set in France, is a UK film with mostly American actors, was filmed in Florida and is set in Texas.
• Louis, the Child King: Several scenes that are supposed to take place inside the Louvre in Paris were filmed at the château of Chambord, the most famous of the Loire Valley Châteaux. Chambord itself was the property of Louis XIII's brother (and Louis XIV's uncle) Gaston d'Orléans at the time.
• The Machinist was set in Los Angeles, but filmed in Barcelona, because it was made with Spanish money.
• In Maverick (1994), the climactic poker game is set on a riverboat steaming the Mississippi River south of St. Louis. Anyone familiar with the area knows that the exterior scenes of the riverboat were shot somewhere very, very different from the Mississippi River south of St. Louis (probably on a river in the Pacific Northwest). Another scene was shot in Yosemite National Park, right under Half Dome.
• Yosemite National Park stood in for the Himalayas in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.
• Miracle at Midnight: The movie is set in Denmark but filmed in Ireland.
• Monty Python's Life of Brian was set in Judea (modern Israel/Palestine) but filmed in Tunisia, around 2000 miles away on a different continent
• "Letters To God" is set in Nashville but was filmed in the Orlando, Florida area.
• Many scenes in The Muppets Take Manhattan where some of the Muppets get jobs in other states, were still filmed in New York. Notably, the scene of Gonzo in "Michigan" was actually filmed at Rye Playland.
• Nam Angels takes place mostly in Vietnam, but said scenes were filmed in the Philippines. The works of Cirio H. Santiago were all done here (Equalizer 2000 taking place in Alaska after World War Three turned it into a desert, for example, but filmed in various quarries).
• Nonnas takes place in Staten Island, where the Enoteca Maria restaurant is located in real-life, but most of it was shot in New Jersey. The movie's depiction of the restaurant was shot at a now-closed Elizabeth, New Jersey restaurant named Spiritos, which, in real life, shut down during the COVID-19 pandemic. The movie even depicts the Enoteca Maria as being a repurposed Spiritos.
• In A Perfect Getaway, Hawaii is played by Puerto Rico. The nutty part is that the area of Hawaii being replicated is the above area that doubles for everywhere else.
• The Post (2017) takes place in Washington, D.C., but a majority of it was actually filmed in White Plains, New York.
• Rules of Engagement has a few scenes set in the fern-filled jungles of Vietnam. The film was shot in Morocco, Virginia and South Carolina.
• While most of School Ties is set in Massachusetts, where it was filmed, the scenes in Scranton, Pennsylvania at the start employed this trope, as they were filmed in Leominster, Massachusetts. The former train station the bus depot scene was shot at (which now houses a liquor store) still has the "SCRANTON, PENNA. BUS DEPOT" decals from filming up on two of its windows to this day.
• The Secret Life Of Walter Mitty has the main character travel through Iceland, Greenland, and Afghanistan on his journey. All three locations were filmed on Iceland, made especially visible by how the Afghanistan horse riding scenes had the characters ride on Icelandic horses, as larger horse breeds are banned from being imported to Iceland.
• Serena is set in the Smoky Mountains, but was filmed in the Czech Republic.
• The Spider-Man Trilogy for the most part split filming between New York City (where the movies are set) and Los Angeles. The second and third movies have other cities stand in for New York:
  • The Traintop Battle between Spidey and Doc Ock in Spider-Man 2 was filmed on the Chicago 'L'. This was a necessity because while the New York City Subway does have a substantial amount of elevated trackage, all of it is in the less-photogenic outer boroughs, and there is none in Manhattan outside of small portions of the 1 train (one scene where Spidey is thrown off the train and dragged along the street was filmed under the viaduct that carries the 1 train across Manhattan Valley at 125th Street) due to most of the elevated lines being replaced with subways in the 1940s. To the movie's credit, every effort was made to conceal any obvious indicators that this is Chicago, although some unaltered station signs for Clark / Lake are momentarily visible as the two foes are getting their footing, and astute viewers will recognize the rolling stock as the 2200 series "L" cars with MTA stickers placed on the sides.
  • The chase scene in Spider-Man 3 where Spider-Man confronts Sandman as he's trying to hijack an armored car was done in Cleveland.
• Spy Game had segments set in Beirut and Vietnam which were both filmed in Morocco. Likewise, Budapest stood in for Berlin, and Oxford, England became Suzhou, China.
• The Substance: The film is set in Hollywood, but entirely filmed in France, with the studio scenes shot in Paris and exterior Los Angeles scenes shot in French Riviera/Côte d'Azur.
• In Terms of Endearment, some scenes set in Texas were actually filmed in Lincoln, Nebraska where the bulk of the film is set. The scene where the station wagon crosses the "Texas State Line" was actually filmed just outside Cortland, NE.
• There is a Russian reversal of the trope. In the USSR, films set in Western European cities were filmed in Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia and Western Ukraine (which have a lot of Gothic and Baroque architecture). Films about the Middle East used Central Asia or Azerbaijan as stand-ins. However, the most glorious example is the Crimean peninsula, with its uniquely diverse natural and cultural landscape. It was, and still is, a perennial favourite of Soviet/Russian film crews and stood for almost everything under the sun; in fact, in Russia the trope would have been named "Crimea Doubling".
• The Philippines doubled for Florida in Thirteen Days with former F-8 Crusaders from the Philippine Air Force repainted in US Navy colors to portray RF-8 jets flying low-level photo reconnaissance missions of the Soviet ballistic missiles in Cuba in 1962.
• Tropic Thunder was shot almost entirely in Hawaii, despite being set in Vietnam (or at least around the South-East Asian area).
• Transformers (Film Series):
  • Transformers (2007) filmed scenes set in the Middle East in the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico for fairly obvious reasons.
  • Transformers: Revenge of The Fallen's climactic battle in Egypt, like the opening scenes of the first movie, was filmed at White Sands. The opening scene set in an industrial area of Shanghai was filmed at the former Bethlehem Steel plant in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. The forest battle, which according to TFWiki was fought in the Pine Barrens in New Jersey (a rather flat area), was filmed in Lincoln National Forest in New Mexico.
  • Transformers: Dark of the Moon had Chicago, aside from portraying itself, double for Sam's apartment in Washington, D.C. The Chernobyl scenes were filmed around northwest Indiana (again, for obvious reasons), while Detroit stood in for some scenes in Chicago.
  • Transformers: Age of Extinction has Michigan and Chicago doubling for China (though production actually filmed there later).
• The outdoors scenes of Los Angeles in the original Total Recall were actually Mexico City; ostensibly because the design, cleanliness and architecture of Mexico City's subway stations have a futuristic look to them. Many other exterior shots were filmed in public roadways and plazas. The rest of the movie was filmed in Estudios Churubusco soundstages.
  • The 2012 film was filmed in Toronto, with its subway system doubling for the London Underground.
• For Richer or Poorer was the first in a growing number of Baltimore Doubling instances. Notably outrageous though, as the much of the movie takes place in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, which is not that far from where the film was actually shot.
• In an inversion, Terminator Salvation is primarily set in California and was filmed in New Mexico. Terminator: Dark Fate goes a step further in leaving the country, as Mexico and Texas were doubled in Spain.
• Prague and some other parts of the Czech Republic stood in for Paris and France in general in Les Misérables (1998).
• The first two live-action Chronicles Of Narnia films were filmed in predominately Czech Republic and Poland, with some work being done in Slovenia and New Zealand as well.
• Nearly all scenes of EuroTrip were filmed in or near Prague. No scene was set in the Czech Republic itself, though Slovakia, which was unified with it as Czechoslovakia until 1993, is featured.
• Spaghetti Westerns were filmed with a variety of European locations doubling for the American West. The semidesertic province of Almería in Spain, with its wide-open spaces that evoked an untamed frontier (and extras who could more or less pass for Mexican), was probably the most common. Some movies were filmed (link in Spanish) in other places of Spain, such as the provinces of Madrid and Burgos, as much, if not more, than in Almería.
• One of the most egregious examples was Battle of the Bulge being filmed in Spain — in particular, the flat, arid, sunny, relatively tree-free part. Note that the actual Battle occurred in the Ardennes — which is hilly and heavily forested — during the winter.
• Many historical films in the 60s and 70s were filmed in Spain - including Chimes at Midnight and The Three Musketeers (1973) - because the labor was cheap, the terrain was varied, and, frankly, Franco's government was incredibly receptive to bribery.
• The Departed is an odd example. It's set in Boston, and some scenes (two weeks' worth) were filmed there, but the majority was filmed in New York. Due to the success of the film, one of the first bills signed into law by Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick was the creation of a massive (25%) tax credit for filmmaking in the Commonwealth. Subsequent films set in Boston, including Ben Affleck's first two movies as a director, have thus been filmed in Boston.
• The Bridge on the River Kwai is set in Thailand, but was filmed in Ceylon (present-day Sri Lanka), a distinction the publicity of the time didn't see fit to make clear. Instead, it raved about the movie being shot in Ceylon in a way which implied the real-life River Kwai was located there.
• Me, Myself & Irene, set in Rhode Island, was at least partially filmed in Vermont.
• RoboCop takes place in Detroit, but none of the movies were actually made there. The first was made in Dallas, the second in Houston, and the third in Atlanta. The 2014 remake only has establishing shots filmed in Detroit, with much of it shot in Toronto.
• Winnipeg has found itself to be a substitute locale for a number of other places, frequently Chicago.
  • The 2004 remake of Shall We Dance? was filmed here, going so far as using the legislative building's bathrooms for a scene.
  • The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, despite being from The Old West, was filmed in Winnipeg's Exchange district (which looks sufficiently old, for that matter).
  • One of the funniest examples is My Big Fat Greek Wedding, which was born of a one-woman play written by and starring Nia Vardalos, a Winnipeg native, set in Winnipeg, about her wedding (in Winnipeg) and her crazy (Winnipeg-based) family, was filmed in Winnipeg, with many Winnipeg landmarks frequently visible, and all the extras (save her real-life husband Ian Gomez) being Winnipeg natives... and the movie was set in Chicago, because apparently an American audience needed an American city to enjoy the movie.
• Hamilton and Brantford doubled for Winnipeg in The Tracey Fragments.
• Steven Spielberg's Munich, scenes set in Tel Aviv, Beirut, Cyprus, Athens and Rome where filmed at Malta, and scenes set in London, Rome, Paris, New York City and a German airport were filmed in Budapest.
• Speaking of Malta, it was used for Rome (well, the Colosseum) in Gladiator. Additionally, a forest in England was used for the opening battle in Germania and Maximus' first gladiator battles were fought in Morocco.
• Practically any movie set in the Middle East is filmed in Morocco for political and security reasons. In addition to ancient or medieval history films, Black Hawk Down has used Morocco to double for war-torn Somalia.
• Virginia has done its of doubling as well, both for itself and for other parts of the Eastern US:
  • In Deep Impact, the traffic jam of people leaving Virginia Beach was actually shot on a newly-built freeway ^note specifically VA 234/Prince William Parkway between VA 28 and I-66 in Manassas, 150 miles away. The terrain is the giveaway; Virginia Beach is on the Atlantic Plain and almost perfectly flat, while Manassas (like most of the DC area north and west of town) is on the not-so-flat Appalachian Piedmont.
  • In Evan Almighty, the village of Crozet (about 10 miles from Charlottesville) doubled for the much more urban Northern Virginia suburbs.
  • A good chunk of Dirty Dancing was shot at the Mountain Lake Hotel near Roanoke. The movie was set in the Catskills in The '60s, but since most of the actual Catskills resorts had shut down (or were in no shape to shoot a movie) by then (1987), another location had to be found.
• Batman Begins and The Dark Knight took place in the fictional Gotham City, of course, but clearly were filmed in Chicago. To the extent that some fans take it for granted that Gotham City is the Nolanverse's equivalent of Chicago. Much of the first film was also filmed in England (the fields surrounding Wayne Manor and what's left of it after it's burned down are clearly not in the US).
  • Chicago also doubles for Hong Kong in The Dark Knight: when Fox is talking with Lau on the roof of Lau's Hong Kong office, you can clearly see Chicago's McCormick Place in the background.
  • Elements of Gotham City from both films (and presumably the third) were also built in the massive disused airship hangars at RAF Cardington, Bedfordshire, England, in a weird case of this trope.
  • In The Dark Knight Rises, Chicago stopped doubling for Gotham. Instead, Pittsburgh, New York City, and Los Angeles were used.
    • Notably from Pittsburgh is the usage of Heinz Field, the home stadium of the Steelers, as the home stadium of the Gotham Rogues. Other parts are represented by Los Angeles.
    • In the same film, the Highlands of Scotland doubled for Uzbekistan, of all places (the Scenery Porn during Bane's plane heist). This was incredibly obvious to anyone who lived nearby or who visits regularly. Not that anyone is complaining.
    • Even more, whatever wasn't filmed in Pittsburgh or Los Angeles was filmed in New York City due to Mayor Michael Bloomberg being a fan of the series (not to mention a subtle tribute to the fact that Gotham, is, in fact, one of the DC Universe's homages to New York along with Metropolis; the Nolanverse even has such things as the police cars using a livery inspired by the one used by the NYPD in the 1990s). Notably, Bane's attack on the Gotham Stock Exchange had exterior filming on the same street as the New York Stock Exchange; and the final battle that takes up most of the film's final act has locations such as Saks Fifth Avenue clearly visible during car chases revolving around a jury-rigged nuclear bomb.
• The Wind and the Lion was filmed in Spain, with Spanish locations being used to portray the Moroccan desert, Tangier, Washington, D.C., Oyster Bay, Long island, and Yellowstone National Park. Railroad buffs will notice some obviously European railroad cars in the background when Theodore Roosevelt is giving a whistle-stop speech; otherwise, it's a pretty convincing job.
• All Wrong Turn films are set in West Virginia, but first two movies were shot in Canada and the third one was shot in Bulgaria.
• Vienna and the countryside around it doubles for Paris and the French countryside in The Three Musketeers (1993). It is somewhat jarring for a native to see Fleur-de-lis in imperial Austrian buildings, or neo-gothic profane buildings being used as gothic cathedral stand-ins.
• Sex and the City 2 was filmed in Morocco, doubling for Abu Dhabi. The filmmakers had asked permission to film in Abu Dhabi (and Dubai before that), but were denied both times.
• Youth In Revolt is set in various California locations (Oakland, Ukiah, Berkeley, Santa Cruz) but was filmed entirely in Michigan.
• In Airport, Lincoln International Airport is supposed to be located in Chicago. Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport was redressed to be used (due to the producers not wanting to risk a lack of snow in Chicago). The first sequel Airport 1975 uses entirely real airports, making use of both Washington Dulles International Airport and Salt Lake City International Airport.
• Bollywood film Kabhi Alvida Na Kehna is supposed to be set in New York City. However, the trains are prominently labeled as SEPTA trains; the regional rail system of Philadelphia.
• The Indian film Fanaa is a really peculiar example of this, as it uses the Polish Tatras to stand in for the Indian bits of the Himalayas (!). As weird as it sounds, according to the producers, this was a cost and logistics saving measure.
• Prophecy is based on Maine, when it was actually shot in New Columbia of Canada. It also popularized the Canada Doubling.
• St. Louis doubled for several cities in Up in the Air (including Milwaukee, where most of the third act takes place). Oddly enough, Missouri does not have a tax-incentive program (an exception was made for the production though).
• St. Louis (mostly East St. Louis, but some on the other side of the river) also doubled for New York on Escape from New York as parts of the area had suffered enough damage to make for a convincing post-apocalyptic setting. A number of the shooting locations have since been restored or rebuilt.
• The Mechanic (1972): Some scenes were actually filmed on location in New Orleans. However, New Orleans also happened to double for Chicago, Houston and Colombia.
• Adrift (2006), the in-name-only sequel to Open Water, is a real hodge-podge - a German production filmed in English with an almost completely American cast, set off the coast of Mexico... and filmed in Malta.
• In Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III, though the film takes place in New York and Ancient Japan, many scenes are actually filmed in Hong Kong and Astoria, Oregon.
• The snowy scenes in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince were actually filmed in Norway. This includes the characters walking to and from Hogsmeade as well as the Hogwarts Express traveling across the snowy countryside. This is the only time the Harry Potter movies have filmed outside of the U.K. and Ireland.
• Mad Max: Fury Road is set in the Australian Outback but was filmed in the southwestern African country of Namibia. Filming was supposed to take place in Australia but the winter before production was extremely rainy and made the landscape too lush for the dystopian setting so production was moved.
• Midsommar is set in Sweden but was filmed outside of Budapest, Hungary.
• Whereas Boogeyman was set in the US but filmed in New Zealand, the sequels were set in the US and filmed in Bulgaria.
• Scream 4 was filmed in Michigan, despite still taking place in the fictional town of Woodsboro, California. The first three films were all filmed in Los Angeles.
• Despite being set in New York and showing Toronto's skyline, much of Kick-Ass is filmed in Hamilton.
• Away We Go depicts a sort of road trip across the United States, but was almost wholly filmed in Connecticut — which doubled for Colorado; Madison, Wisconsin; and Montreal.
• A Knight's Tale had the Czech Republic double for France and London.
• The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen was partly filmed in the Czech Republic.
• Most of the exterior shots of the first Mortal Kombat (1995) movie were filmed in Thailand, and it really shows, particularly when it's doubling for China. Thai Buddhist temples look waaaay different from Chinese ones.
• Several scenes in Home Alone 2: Lost in New York that take place in New York were actually shot in Chicago.
• Marvel Cinematic Universe examples:
  • The Avengers' city scenes, set in New York and Stuttgart, were shot in Cleveland.
  • Captain America: The Winter Soldier is primarily set in Washington, D.C., but was mostly filmed in Cleveland.
  • In Captain America: Civil War, Berlin, Germany stands in for Bucharest, Romania and Vienna, Austria.
• Rock of Ages takes place in Los Angeles and Hollywood but was shot in Miami. Inverted, one could say.
• In the Missing in Action movies, Vietnam is played by the Philippines in the first (which was actually the second) and third movies, while Mexico and the Caribbean island of St. Kitts took the "role" in the second (which was the first).
• The 1974 version of Murder on the Orient Express had scenes filmed in Istanbul, but the train scenes were filmed in France. The 2017 remake replaced Istanbul with Malta but filmed everything else on backlot.
• The countryside of the Czech Republic doubles for Southern England in Dark Blue World, which would have been all right if it weren't for the conspicuous forested hills and snowy mountains in the background.
• Jumping the Broom has Nova Scotia, Canada doubling as Martha's Vineyard.
• The Liza Minnelli and Burt Reynolds vehicle Rent-a-Cop, set in Chicago, was mostly filmed in Italy.
• Robert Altman's film of the play Beyond Therapy, though set in New York, was shot in Paris because he was living there at the time.
• The Washington Sentinels in The Replacements (2000) played their home games in Baltimore's M&T Bank Stadium. Also, the Sentinels' only road game in the film was shot at FedEx Field, home of the Washington Commanders.
• Haywire, which otherwise averts this trope (the movie's Ireland and Spain settings were indeed filmed there), has New Mexico playing New York State.
• Major League, the popular 1989 comedy about the Cleveland Indians baseball team, was not actually filmed in Cleveland but rather in Milwaukee. Milwaukee's County Stadium acted as a stand-in for the Indians' then-home, Cleveland Municipal Stadium. However, since the two ballparks were relatively close in age and architectural style, it was a plausible alternate. Such was not the case, however, for the movie's sequel, Major League II, which also was not filmed in Cleveland but instead in Baltimore. That movie was shot in the fall of 1993, which just so happened to be in between the seasons that—in real life—the Indians moved from their old home at Cleveland Stadium to their new home, Jacobs Field (now known as Progressive Field). Producers used the Baltimore Orioles' home ballpark, Oriole Park at Camden Yards, as the Indians' home stadium. Oriole Park was built just two years before Jacobs Field and featured the same architects and neo-classical style as Jacobs Field, so one would think that producers would have used the stadium as a stand-in for Jacobs Field. However, producers instead inexplicably dressed up Oriole Park as the Indians' old stadium, Cleveland Stadium, despite the fact that the former was 56 years newer than the latter and bore no physical resemblance to it. Producers were so sloppy with the stand-in that one can notice numerous advertisements for local Baltimore businesses left conspicuous despite the film supposedly taking place in Cleveland.
• Oblivion (2013) is set in New York City and New York State, but it was filmed (for the most part) on location in Iceland. Justified in that the Alien Invasion and subsequent war has turned the place unrecognizable except for some remaining landmarks.
• Man of Steel: Chicago stands in for the fictional city of Metropolis, similar to The Dark Knight Trilogy and Smallville has Plano, Illinois stand in for the fictional Smallville in Kansas. Kansas was not at any point an actual filming location.
• World War Z is LOADED with this trope. Having been filmed almost entirely in Europe with (to name a few) Glasgow doubling for Philadelphia (The square with the red pavement is George Square), La Valletta doubling for Jerusalem and various towns and cities in England doubling as Canada, South Korea and Wales (despite Wales also being a filming location for other scenes).
• Where the Heart Is mostly takes place in Oklahoma, with one scene in Maine, but was filmed entirely in Texas. Baylor University stood in for Maine's Bowdoin College.
• A bizarre inversion in Youth in Revolt. The film is set in various California locations — Oakland, Clearlake, Berkeley, Ukiah, etc. — but it was filmed entirely in Michigan, with some reshoots in Louisiana. Obviously, Michigan looks nothing like California, though it could be said that the exact setting of the story is unimportant.
• In Godzilla (2014), San Francisco International Airport doubles for Honolulu International Airport.
• Double subverted in We Were Soldiers. Northern California is made to stand in for the Ia Drang Valley... which in turn looks suspiciously◊ like◊ northern California.
• The Sea of Trees is set within the infamous suicide forest at the base of Mount Fuji in Japan, but was filmed in the Purgatory Chasm State Reservation and other locations in Massachusetts.
• Pittsburgh portrayed Indianapolis in The Fault in Our Stars, due to Pennsylvania offering more generous film-production tax credits than Indiana.
• While Titanic (1997) does include footage from the actual shipwreck, and there was some filming in the Northern Atlantic where the ship sunk (the Canadian province of Nova Scotia), most of it was actually done in the Pacific Ocean — mostly in Baja California, Mexico, using a studio Fox built for the production and a huge water tank.
• The film version of Oklahoma! had exterior scenes shot in Arizona.
• Except for a couple of establishing shots, most scenes set in California or Nevada in The Godfather were filmed in New York.
• Patton was filmed in Spain, doubling for Tunisia, Sicily, and Belgium.
• The Martian was (obviously) not filmed on Mars, but in Wadi Rum, Jordan, a red-colored desert on Earth.
  • Additionally, Budapest doubles as Beijing with the Ludwig Museum being used as the CSA headquarters in an establishing shot (with the Chinese letters CGI'd on it, but the rather recognizable bridge behind it left in place). Another building, the futuristic "Whale" served as NASA HQ, though it was mostly seen from the inside.
• The Jekyll and Hyde adaptation by Studio A'yoy ^note  What? had a double whammy - Zielona Góra doubling for London, which in the book was doubling for Edinburgh (as we are informed).
• Need a city that looks like a major German city before (or during) World War II? There's Görlitz^note The Easternmost city of Germany, about one hour from Dresden and two hours from Berlin. It contains a pretty unique assembly of almost all architectural styles up to the war era and was left untouched by the war itself. Both German and big budget Hollywood productions (e.g. Valkyrie) have shot there with Görlitz standing in for Berlin quite a lot. Locals have taken to calling it Görliwood, naturally.
• Die Hard 2, supposedly set at Washington Dulles International Airport, was actually filmed in several different locations in Colorado, Michigan, and California. One scene has McClane in the airport talking on the phone to his wife who is in an approaching plane, and "Pacific Bell" can clearly be read on the payphone he's using.
• Ernest Saves Christmas takes place in Central Florida and most of the filming was done in the area. But a couple of scenes were filmed in Nashville, Tennessee.
• Silence is set in Japan but filmed in Taiwan because Japan's landscape has changed drastically from the the 17th century to the 21st.
• Metropolis and Gotham City are basically the good and bad sides of New York split into two cities. Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice was mostly filmed in Michigan. A scene in Africa is actually New Mexico as the Ebola outbreak forced the filmmakers to abandon filming on location.
• Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure has Arizona (namely Phoenix and Tempe) doubling for San Dimas, California and Italy doubling for England.
• Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle is set in New Jersey, but most of the movie was shot in Canada. The White Castle in the end was actually constructed on site, because the White Castle ownership's strict opposition to franchising means the chain is non-existent in Canada.
• her (2013): A number of exterior shots where Theodore walks around what's presented as 2025 Los Angeles are recognizably (to anyone who's been there) filmed in Shanghai, in order to make the cityscape seem more futuristic. However, the film avoids giving the game away by not showing any of the Chinese city's iconic buildings, such as the Oriental Pearl Tower.
• In Forrest Gump, South Carolina doubles for Alabama.
• Howling II: Stirba: Werewolf Bitch: The scenes set in Transylvania are filmed in Czechoslovakia.
• While taking place almost entirely in Italy and France, To Hell and Back (based on the war memoirs of, and starring Audie Murphy As Himself) was filmed on and around various military training areas in Washington state. As a result, the terrain features no paved roads, telephone lines, church steeples, villages, or any other signs of habitation, Misplaced Vegetation abounds, and to top it off, everything seems to have been shot in late spring and early summer. The action at Holtzwihr, for which Murphy received the Medal of Honor, took place in the bitterly cold winter of 1944-1945 (Murphy said of fighting from the back of a burning armored vehicle "it was the only time that winter that my feet were warm") but in the film, it's a warm summer day without a single snowflake in sight.
• Arctic is set in, well, the Arctic, but it was shot in Iceland.
• Home Alone: The Holiday Heist is the first Home Alone film to not involve Chicago at all (it's set in Maine) and the first to be filmed in Canada (specifically, Winnipeg).
• The Return of Sherlock Holmes has 2015 New York doubling for 1894 London.
• The two Grown Ups movies, which supposedly take place in upstate New York, were filmed in Marblehead, Massachusetts. Adam Sandler has apparently grown fond of the town, as he later shot Hubie Halloween there, despite the film taking place in Salem.
• Most of the Hallmark Channel's Christmas films are shot in Canada. Vancouver, of course, is the most popular filming location, but it's hardly the only one. Not only does Canada offer tax credits, but many small towns in the Canadian countryside are filled with the kinds of rustic architecture associated with the holiday, and the transition from fall to winter matches the ideal scenery that many American viewers have in their minds of the Christmas season. Thanks to quick turnaround, it's possible to film a Hallmark movie in September or October as the leaves are turning in Canada (or even with snow on the ground in some places), then air it in November or December as winter settles in in the US. Towns like Almonte, Ontario that served as popular filming locations have even received Tourist Bumps as a result. Ironically, the Hallmark Channel isn't available in Canada; you have to watch the W Network to pick up their Countdown to Christmas series of holiday films.
• Eastern Condors: The Vietnam scenes were shot in the Philippines, while the American scenes were shot in Canada.
• In a sort of inversion, Mandy (2018) is set in California, but was shot in Belgium.
• Evil Breed: The Legend of Samhain is set is Ireland, but was shot in Quebec. This is made obvious by the lack of right-hand drive vehicles.
• Heatwave (2022): Maple City, British Columbia stands in for an unspecified American setting.
• Jason and the Argonauts: Several scenes were filmed in Italy instead of Greece, Aegean Sea islands and the Black Sea (the way to Colchis, modern-day Armenia). Amusingly, the temple of Hera in Paestum near Salerno was used as a temple of Zeus.
• The jungle scenes in Jungle were shot in Colombia, rather than Bolivia where the events actually happened. Most viewers would be hard-pressed to tell the difference.
• Although set in Toledo, Spain, The Pit and the Pendulum (1991) was shot at Castello di Giove in Italy.
• Quebec City for Boston, New York, Washington DC or Philadelphia in Period Pieces made after the 1970s, because unlike the American cities it never underwent "Urban Renewal". Its colonial downtown is still present, and the waterfront Promenade is often featured (despite no such feature being present in any of the American cities it doubles for). This can be especially funny in the case of decidedly landlocked Philadelphia. Especially before the 1990s economic renewal of Quebec, it was also a cheaper location. It has also stood in for pre-19th Century Paris, since it has the small winding streets, low skyline and frequently overcast weather: as well as being positioned on a large river with an island in the middle. The fact that the locals are bilingual also adds realism while removing the potential headaches of navigating a language barrier between local government and production crew.
• Fire in the Sky: The outdoor scenes that were supposed to be in the mountains of Arizona were actually filmed in southern Oregon.
• The Art of the Steal: The scenes set in Warsaw were actually shot in Budapest. Unfornately, several Budapest landmarks and Romanian flags are clearly visible in these scenes. Bucharest also briefly doubles for Amsterdam, but this scene is so brief that it could have been in any European city.
• Unfriended was shot in a single house in Santa Clarita, standing in for multiple houses in Fresno.
• The Fate of the Furious: The New York scenes were shot in Cleveland. In fact it is obvious these scenes were not filmed on location in New York, as most streets in Manhattan run in one direction, while the ones shown in the movie are bidirectional based on the road markings that are visible throughout.
• The Italian city of Matera has stood in for Jerusalem in countless biblical films or similar stories — mainly for political and security reasons, but also due to its ramparts. Notable examples of Matera playing Jerusalem include The Gospel According to St. Matthew and Ben-Hur (2016).
• The Brazilian movie La Situación has Uruguay as a stand-in for both Argentina and Paraguay.
• The titular town of Silent Hill and Silent Hill: Revelation 3D is in West Virginia, but both films were filmed in Ontario. The first movie was filmed in Brantford while the second movie was filmed in Toronto.
• Zig-zagged for Free Willy. While the scenes depicting Willy were mostly shot at Reino Aventura (now Six Flags Mexico) in Mexico City, where Keiko, the orca that played Willy, was in captivity at the time, everything else was shot on location in Oregon and Washington, the former state being where the film is set.
• Hellboy: The Crooked Man takes place in rural Appalachia, but was filmed in Bulgaria.
• Road House (2024) mostly takes place in the Florida Keys, but was shot in the Dominican Republic.
• Farha is set in Mandatory Palestine, but was filmed in Jordan. Luckily, western Jordan and Palestine have very similar landscapes, and both countries speak the same dialect of Arabic.
• Jordan doubled for Mars in The Last Day On Mars, as well as other fictional alien desert planets in Rogue One and Dune: Part One in the Wadi Rum Protected Area, aka the Valley of the Moon.
• The 2023 film Joika, a biopic about ballerina Joy Womack, is mostly set in Moscow, but was filmed in Warsaw, Poland.
• The Raven (2012) takes place in 19th-century Baltimore, Maryland, but was filmed in Serbia and Hungary.
• The Power of One filmed in Zimbabwe for South Africa (this was before the fall of apartheid)
• The Kite Runner takes place in Afghanistan, but was filmed in the western Chinese city of Kashgar.
• Night Hunter (2019): Winnipeg, Manitoba doubles for Minneapolis, Minnesota.
• In the Mood for Love is set in Hong Kong, but all exterior filming was done in Bangkok. This is because the film is set in the sixties, but by the nineties Hong Kong had changed and modernized so much that it was practically impossible to find places in the city that looked like the way it used to look, while Bangkok's Chinatown had a distinctly old-fashioned feel that reminded Wong Kar-wai of 1960s Hong Kong.

• The cover art for Ciem: Vigilante Centipede and its tie-in playlist uses downtown Grand Ledge, Michigan as a double for downtown Evansville, ndiana. There are parts of Evansville that do match with parts of the greater Lansing area, but it can still be difficult to make one a convincing double of the other. The author/photographer chose Grand Ledge as a double anyway, largely to save on gas.
• Lampshaded in Stephen King and Peter Straub's The Talisman. Given Jack Sawyer's experiences in Hollywood, as well as his mother's reputation as Lily "Queen of the B's" Cavanaugh, Jack spots similarities between New England and the ominous Point Venuti in Northern California, remembering that if any scenes on the beach needed to be filmed in the Northeast climate called for in the former, places like the latter would be employed.
• In Razor Girl by Carl Hiaasen, Bayou Brethren, a staged Reality Show about raising chickens in Louisiana, is shot in the Florida Everglades. Its actors also aren't Louisiana natives.

In General:

• Sometimes Getting the Accent Right can distract the viewer from the wrong setting. Cagney & Lacey was set in NYC, but filmed in California, yet still felt right, because everyone in the cast sounded like they lived in NYC. Contrast with CSI: NY where almost no one sounds like an East coaster at all, let alone a New Yorker. Of course, because the Law & Order shows were filmed there, even the extras with one line sounded like New Yorkers. It's also one of the few shows where Sesame Street regulars pop up in cameos, because Sesame Street is also filmed in New York.
  • Not to mention that Tyne Daly and Sharon Gless, in real life, don't sound anything like they do on the show.
• Due to the major German television broadcasters producing most of their stuff in Cologne, there is certainly much Cologne Doubling to be found in German TV. One show got caught red handed: While the dialogue established the scene to be in a different city, the cars had Cologne license plates.
• Gemenc forest (Hungary) doubles frequently for other forests (such as in the Robin Hood series or in Kröd Mändoon and the Flaming Sword of Fire).
• The Volusia County Courthouse and environs, during The '90s, was frequently used as a courthouse or other corporate/municipal building in futuristic shows.

By Series:

• The Americans, largely set in the Washington, D.C., area, is shot in New York City, which also doubles for Philadelphia and the Soviet Union in various episodes.
• The Canadian miniseries Bad Blood, about the Rizzuto crime family, is set in Montreal, a city known for standing in for other cities in film projects. So naturally it's filmed in Sudbury, a mining city in northern Ontario with about a tenth of Montreal's population.
• In an episode of Blindspot the New-York-based FBI agents make a quick visit to the CDC headquarters. where they learn of a potential outbreak in "nearby" New York Harbor. The CDC headquarters is actually in Atlanta. (For once, this isn't fake scenery but a faked-out detail in the script).
• The medieval England-set Cadfael was filmed in Hungary, presumably since most of England doesn't have that undeveloped medieval look any more.
• The Cherry Queen is set in Germany between 1913 and 1946, and was shot in the Czech Republic.
• The Chosen:
  • Season 1 takes place in 1st century Galilee and culminates in a journey by Jesus and his group to Samaria, but was filmed in and around Pooleville and Weatherford, Texas within the Dallas-Fort Worth area.
  • Season 2 takes place in adjacent regions to Galilee and Samaria, such as Syria and Judea, but was primarily filmed on the LDS Motion Picture Studios South Campus in Elberta, Utah, a site chosen by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints because of the surrounding area's similarity to Jerusalem's geography - including hills, plains, cedar trees, and a stream. Creator Dallas Jenkins shared this sentiment, noting the site's similarity to the Holy Land by stating that they could not re-create it anywhere else, adding "you can't even get this in Israel."
  • Season 3 takes place primarily in Capernaum, but was filmed on a purpose-built site in Midlothian, Texas. The site in Midlothian had been chosen because of its similarities with the Middle East in both topography and weather.
• The 2023 Hong Kong TV series Dead Ringer (2023) (no relation to Dead Ringers (2023)) of the film setting at Singapore and Hong Kong, but all Singapore sequence episodes are filmed in Hong Kong due to COVID 19 Pandemic-related restriction.
• The 1989 TV series Doctor Doctor was supposedly set in Providence, Rhode Island, but nearly all outdoor footage was shot in Denver, Colorado. This explains why you occasionally see the Rocky Mountains in the background; the highest point in the actual state of Rhode Island is only 812 feet above sea level.
• Doctor Who:
  • The Croatian city of Trogir has stood in for the City of Canals in "The Vampires of Venice" and for Arles and the surrounding French countryside in "Vincent and the Doctor".
  • The Canary Islands have been used on several occasions:
    • The Fifth Doctor serial "Planet of Fire", in adition to featuring scenes actually set (and filmed) in Lanzarote, also used its otherworldly volcanic landscape to represent the volcanic alien planet of Sarn.
    • In Series 8's "Kill the Moon", CGI-augmented shots of volcanic mountain plains on the island of Lanzarote double for the surface of the Moon.
    • The Series 9 opening two-parter "The Magician's Apprentice"/"The Witch's Familiar filmed scenes set on the surface of Skaro in Tenerife.
    • The Series 9 finale "Hell Bent" used a different Canary Island, Fuerteventura, for scenes set on the surface of Gallifrey.
  • South Africa has played the planet Desolation, Alabama, the Ivory Coast, the Australian Outback and the San Francisco Bay Area.
• Ed was set in Ohio. All outdoor scenes were filmed in Westfield, New Jersey.
• For Emerald City, many scenes set in the eponymous city were filmed in Barcelona. Anyone casually familiar with the city will notice Gaudi's work, most notably scenes taking place inside Park Güell.
• Apart from some on-location shoots, the miniseries Eric (2024), set in 1980s New York City, was mostly shot in Budapest, Hungary.
• In the first episode of The Event, Sean and Leila's "Caribbean" cruise was filmed off the coast of Hawaii.
• Season 4 of Fargo is set in 1950s Kansas City, but was filmed in Chicago. It's pretty apparent that the Kansas City Union Station massacre late in the season is actually in Chicago Union Station.
• Forbidden Science: The series is set somewhere in the US. It was filmed in Hamilton, Ontario.
• Full House is set in San Francisco, but most on-location filming was done in Los Angeles, where the show was filmed. This is averted for the opening credits and the season eight premiere, where were actually filmed on location in San Francisco.
• Gangland Undercover: The series is set in California. However, it was filmed in Ontario.
• Gangnam Project: The series is set in Seoul, South Korea, but was filmed in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada.
• The miniseries Girl Taken takes place in a small village in the UK, but was filmed in the Basque Region of Spain.
• The Girls episode "The Return" has Hannah go back to her family in what purports to be East Lansing, Michigan. This bit was actually shot in Mamaroneck, Westchester County, New York, a suburban area just a bit north of New York City; it certainly looks like nothing like East Lansing (for one thing, it's too hilly).
• The Good Wife is set in Chicago and filmed in New York. It's hid pretty well by the fact that much of the filming is in done in the outer boroughs.
• While Gossip Girl normally averts this trope, there are a few exceptions: New York State played Connecticut in "New Haven Can Wait" and "The Townie", and Europe in "The Return Of The Ring" (for the ending in Monte Carlo) and "Gone Maybe Gone" (for the pre-credit scenes in Monte Carlo and Italy).
• Graceland takes place in California, but is actually filmed in Florida, creating a strange inversion of this trope. You can see this in many shots, when there are no mountains where there should be some.
• The Highwayman (a Glen A. Larson series) was set around America but filmed in Arizona.
• House of Cards (US) is set in Washington DC, with parts in exotic locales like China, St. Louis, New York, Kansas City and California. But due to high costs of filming in Washington, nearly all location shots (and some interiors like restaurants and hearing rooms) were done in the Baltimore area, which is cheaper to shoot in and much closer to the show's sets in Joppa, northeast of Baltimore City. Averted in the second season when one plotline does take place in Joppa.
• Interview with the Vampire (2022): For Season 2, Prague stands in for Paris.
• In the Heat of the Night was set in Sparta, Mississippi, but was filmed in Louisiana for the first season, and then in Covington, Georgia for seasons 2-6.
• In-Universe example with iZombie: the Show Within a Show Zombie High takes place in Oregon, but is shot in Seattle for tax break purposes (lampshading how iZombie itself takes part in Vancouver Doubling).
• John Adams (2008) takes place in various parts of colonial United States, including Philadelphia and Boston, but the mini-series was shot almost entirely in the state of Virginia. Scenes that took place in BOTH Philadelphia and Boston were filmed using old colonial buildings in and around Williamsburg. However, the scenes taking place in Europe were shot on-location.
• Turn is filmed in Central Virginia, despite taking place in the Revolutionary-era Northeast (centering on the Long Island town of Setauket, but frequently venturing to New York City, rural Connecticut and New Jersey, and even to Philadelphia for a few episodes). Virginia is a popular filming site for historical period pieces, mostly because it has good tax breaks and because it has a wide variety of colonial sites to film at, while the Northeastern sites are frequently covered over by development.
• The pilot episode of Justified was shot in Western Pennsylvania, doubling for Kentucky. Subsequent episodes have the more common Southern California doubling, though this was averted for one episode that actually took place in Southern California.
• Less Than Kind is an aversion (since it was both filmed and set in Winnipeg) but there's an odd in-city example - in the episode where Sheldon, Miriam, and Danny are taking an art course at "the university", the outdoor shot shows the Winnipeg Mint.
• Seasons 2-4 of Leverage were set in Boston and filmed in Portland, Oregon. Season 1 averted the trope for the most part, being set and filmed in Los Angeles, while Season 5 averted it by writing in the team's having to relocate to Portland to avoid law enforcement attention.
• Lost features Hawaii Doubling, with the help of CGI backgrounds (primarily from Sydney, Korea, and London).
  • Jack's off-Island scenes in the third season finale were shot on location in Los Angeles, with hospital scenes borrowing sets from Grey's Anatomy. This was the first time the show filmed outside Hawaii.
  • Alan Dale's scenes in the second half of season 4 were actually filmed in London. He was appearing in Spamalot at the time, so he couldn't make it to Hawaii. The crew obviously took advantage of this by having one scene set prominently near Tower Bridge.
• The TV miniseries The Lost Room has a scene set in Las Vegas. In one take, an Albuquerque bus drives past; in another, the Sandia Mountains - what Albuquerque has to the west instead of a skyline - are clearly visible.
• The pilot for The Lying Game was filmed on location in New Mexico; production for the series shifted to Texas. The series is set mainly in Phoenix and Las Vegas (with stops in Los Angeles).
• The short-lived FOX series Mental was set in Los Angeles but shot in Bogota, Colombia.
• Marvel Cinematic Universe:
  • The Falcon and the Winter Soldier uses the Atlanta metropolitan area and the Czech Republic for a wide array of locations, including Louisiana, Baltimore and Munich.
  • Moon Knight (2022) starts in London and happens primarily in Egypt, but was filmed in Hungary, Slovenia and Jordan.
  • Ms. Marvel (2022), set in New Jersey, was mostly filmed in Georgia, aside from secondary plates actually in Jersey. When Kamala and her mother travel to Pakistan, most of the scenes were actually filmed in Thailand.
• The Musketeers, being a version of The Three Musketeers, takes place in France but was filmed in the Czech Republic.
• Nashville also averts this trope except when it leaves the title city - in "I'm Sorry For You, My Friend" Nashville plays San Diego (thus taking California Doubling to its logical conclusion), Atlanta, Austin and itself. the most extreme case came in the final season where Tennessee stood in for Bolivia (Even here there's an exception, as noted in the Aversions folder.)
• Lithuania doubles for Merrie Olde England in The New Adventures of Robin Hood.
• While Person of Interest is set and shot in New York, both the city and upstate locations double for areas as diverse as Texas, Iraq, Rome, Sankt-Petersburg, and Ordos Kangbashi. They did, however, shoot parts of a fifth season episode in Washington D.C., where the story was set.
• The pilot for Quantico, set in Virginia (flashbacks) and New York City (present), was shot in Atlanta; the series was shot in Québec. For season two production transferred to NYC.
• Reginald The Vampire is set in Akron, Ohio but was filmed in and around Victoria, British Columbia. Not only does the local architecture and geography scream Pacific Northwest rather than Great Lakes, but Akron in real life is 31% African-American, yet the only two black characters in the show are explicitly not from there. In fact all the characters that are actually from Akron are white except for Reggie himself.
• Revival (2025): The series is filmed in New Brunswick, Canada. It’s set in Wisconsin.
• SAS: Rogue Heroes: Season 1 was filmed in Morocco, representing Egypt along with Libya. Season 2 was filmed in Croatia, representing Sicily and the Italian mainland.
• Search: It's unknown where scenes set in the Korean Demilitarised Zone were filmed, but for obvious reasons it was impossible to film them on location.
• Sharpe used Ukraine and Turkey to double for a variety of locations, including Spain.
• The 1990s version of Sheena, set in Africa, was filmed in Florida.
• "St. Louis, Missouri" in the Supernatural episode "Skin" looks very Canadian, with pine trees along the highway that is supposedly outside St. Louis (which does have some pine trees, but the deciduous trees dominate them, since their numbers are far more vast). Also, with "Home", Kansas isn't nearly that leafy, and Cape Girardeau is not the racist small town that "Route 666" would have you believe—it's actually a college town, since Southeast Missouri State University (SEMO) is in Cape Girardeau.
• The miniseries Texas Rising was shot, ironically, in Mexico, which led to several The Mountains of Illinois moments, among other geographical inaccuracies.
• Thunder in Paradise had episodes set in many exotic locations, but the entire series was filmed in Florida, often making use of EPCOT Center's World Showcase and other locations at Walt Disney World.
• Tropical Heat/Sweating Bullets was a primarily Canadian production; the three seasons were shot in Mexico (for tax reasons), Israel, and South Africa. It was set in the fictional Florida Keys town of Key Mariah.
• Walking with…: Because the various series intended to show the natural environments that existed in prehistoric times, rather obviously very few of the locations were actually filmed where they're set. The "Making Of" chronicles the difficulty of finding suitable modern locales in exotic spots around the world that resembled the Earth during the Mesozoic Era (mostly to the omnipresence of grass, a flora which, at the time, was not known to have existed during the time period).
  • Walking with Dinosaurs:
    • The first episode, "New Blood", set in Arizona during the Late Triassic, was filmed in the arid scrubland of New Caledonia.
    • The second episode, "Time of Titans", set in Colorado during the Late Jurassic, was mostly filmed in the redwood forests of California, while some parts were in Chile and Tasmania.
    • The third episode, "Cruel Sea", set in England during the Late Jurassic, was mostly filmed in the Bahamas, while the beach scenes were in New Caledonia.
    • The fourth episode, "Giant of the Skies", set in North America, Brazil, and England during the Early Cretaceous, and the fifth episode, "Spirits of the Ice Forest", set in Antarctica during the Mid Cretaceous, were both filmed in various parts of New Zealand and Tasmania.
    • The last episode, "Death of a Dynasty", set in Montana during the Late Cretaceous, was filmed at Conguillío National Park in Chile. This location was revisited for the first Prehistoric Park episode, which was set in the same time and place.
  • Walking with Beasts:
    • The first episode, "New Dawn", set in Germany during the Early Eocene, was filmed in the rainforests of Java.
    • The second episode, Whale Killer" set around the coast of the Tethys Sea during the Late Eocene, was filmed in the Chihuahuan Desert for the inland scenes, the Florida Keys for the mangrove scenes.
    • The third episode, "Land of Giants", set in Mongolia during the Late Oligocene, was filmed in the scrublands of Arizona and the Chihuahuan Desert again.
    • The fourth episode, Next of Kin", set in Ethiopia during the Pliocene, largely averts this; it was mostly filmed in Ethiopia, because the region has not changed drastically in the time since the episode is set, although some parts were also in South Africa.
    • The fifth episode, Sabre Tooth, set in the Pleistocene of South America, also averts this; it was filmed in the cerrados of Brazil, because, again, the region was not that different then as it is now.
    • The sixth episode, "Mammoth Journey", set in Europe during the Quaternary, was filmed in the snowy taiga of Yukon (this location was revisited for the second Prehistoric Park episode, also set in Europe during the ice age).
  • Walking with Monsters:
    • The Early Silurian segment, set in South Wales, was filmed in Arizona during the portion showing the Cephalaspis migration upriver.
    • The Late Devonian segment, set in Pennsylvania, was filmed in Devil's Postpile National Monument, which is near Mammoth Mountain in California.
    • The Late Carboniferous segment, set in Kansas, was filmed in Florida, in swamp forest that was modified in post-production to make it look more prehistoric.
    • The Early Permian segment, set in Germany, was filmed in Inyo National Forest in California, in the bristlecone pine groves.
    • Both the Late Permian segment, set in Siberia, and the Early Triassic segment, set in Antarctica, were filmed on Gran Canaria and Fuerteventura, two of the Canary Islands.
  • Chased by Dinosaurs:
    • "The Giant Claw", set in Mongolia during the Late Cretaceous, was filmed on K'gari, off the coast of Queensland. The desert in the episode was actually just a big beach.
    • "Land of Giants", set in Argentina during the Mid Cretaceous, was filmed in Tenerife, the largest of the Canary Islands. Much of the volcanic landscape was the ash-covered slopes of Mount Teide.
  • Sea Monsters: Most of the series was filmed around the Bahamas, offshore from the West Coast in New Zealand, and in the Red Sea, off the coast of Egypt. Technically, the Eocene segment is an aversion, since it's also set in Egypt, but it is otherwise played straight because no other segment is set in any of the filming locations (which varied from Peru, Kansas, Ohio, Switzerland, New York, and England).
• Wednesday is hinted to be set in Vermont, but was entirely shot in Romania.
• Wildfire (2005) takes place in central California (east of Oakland), but was filmed in New Mexico because of tax incentives. A riverside location frequently used in this series also turns up in Breaking Bad.

TV Movies:

• Blue Lagoon: The Awakening is mostly set on an island off the coast of Trinidad, but was actually filmed in Hawaii.
• Romania stands in for Merrie Old England in the Made-for-TV Movie Princess of Thieves.
• 2003's The Elizabeth Smart Story has Salt Lake City, a landlocked city wedged between the mountains and the desert, portrayed by Halifax, Nova Scotia, a maritime port city that was founded about a century earlier.
• The TV movie Killing Kennedy was shot in the Richmond area, despite the scenes taking place mostly in Dallas circa 1963. Richmond also doubled for New Orleans, Washington DC, Russia, and Mexico City while stock footage was used for key aerial shots.

• Sabaton: The videos for both "The Unkillable Soldier" and "Templars" are set in France but were filmed in Serbia.

• Inverted with Premier's mockbuster game Hollywood Heat, as the "Hollywood" scene on the backbox was actually shot in Miami, Florida.

• Raccoon City in the 2nd and 3rd games of the Resident Evil franchise is supposed to be designed after a typical small town in the United States, but in the games, you can see most of the streets are too narrow to allow traffic to go in both directions and there are a ton of alleyways; narrow streets and numerous alleys is something that is common in Japan and Capcom, the creators of Resident Evil, is located in Japan. The remake of the second game fixes the issue by making Raccoon City an actual city instead of a large town and the streets accommodate several lanes of traffic.
  • Capcom also produces the Ace Attorney franchise, whose games are supposed to take place in the United States^note Los Angeles, specifically, which ironically means California is the one being doubled for this time, yet many locations are based on Japanese structures and cultures and the court system is based more off of the Japanese courts than American courts. It also doesn't help that the Japanese version of the games are written to take place directly in Japan, which makes many of the settings and characters fit better. According to Word of God, the first game was made with localization in mind while the sequels didn't have any immediate plans to be localized, which is why they have a lot of Japanese cultural references and why the localized versions fall into the trope. One of the localizers explained that the reason the the localized games have so much Japanese references and cultures is due the settings taking place in an alternate timeline where anti-Japanese laws in the United States never existed, allowing Japanese citizens to live and flourish in California.
• World of Warcraft had an official patch trailer depicting Kel'thuzad journeying to Northrend and joining the Scourge. However the trailer was made back in the vanilla version of the game, where Northrend hadn't been programmed into the game yet. So they had Kel'thuzad wander around Winterspring instead.
• Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2's "Wolverines" mission is set in northeastern Virginia, but the strip mall is modeled after a location in Vancouver, WA.
• Most of the backgrounds for Yamaku High School in Katawa Shoujo, a Western-developed Dating Sim set in Japan, are actually pictures of the Brown University campus (located in Rhode Island). Additionally, in an instance of actual California Doubling, the kitchen from the Ibarazaki house appears to be of a not especially uncommon design in the San Francisco bay area.
• Battlefield 4 has a particularly amusing (and possibly self-referential) instance, where the fourth mission is explicitly stated to take place in Singapore, but if you pay attention you'll notice that the actual level geography is almost identical to that for the multiplayer level Siege of Shanghai.
• TV shows in Grand Theft Auto and The Sims are typically Machinima made using their respective games, but when they can't make the shows they want using their assets, they rely on other games from their respective publishers:
  • GTA has used the Red Dead games (both Revolver and Redemption) for footage of deserts and/or horses, Bully (2006) for footage of a boarding school, and MLB 2K13 for footage of a baseball game.
  • The Sims uses footage of various EA Sports games on the sports channels, and The Sims 2 used SimCity 4 footage whenever a show needs footage of an overhead shot of a city.
• Trauma Center takes places in Angles Bay, a fictional city in California, and also takes place in Great Britain, Europe. Despite the what the game tells you about the locations, it's clear that the "California" in game is actually Japan due to the blatant Japanese signage in one of the city backgrounds and the narrow alleys and small houses in another background. The map showing Angeles Bay also looks more like Japanese topography than California topography due to the very vast mountain ranges, something that California does not have much of by comparison. Ditto for the map showing Great Brittan that looks more like California (or at least a general American coastline) than Great Brittan. All the above is due to the Japanese version of the game actually taking places in Japan while the second area takes place in the United States instead of Europe. The art assets wasn't changed during localization.
• The Quiet Man's Live Action Cutscenes were filmed in Bulgaria, but the game itself is set in New York, resulting in the license plates on cars being poorly covered up with American license plates.
• Invoked in RoboCop: Rogue City. Like every entry in the franchise, the game is set in Detroit, but the in-game skyline is modeled after Dallas, Texas, where the first movie was filmed, in enough detail that Reunion Tower is clearly visible.
• An in-universe example happens in Stuntman: Ignition. The first film you work on, the Disaster Movie Aftershock, is presumably set in the United States but is filmed in British Columbia, Canada, while the final film, the Dark Knight parody Night Avenger, is filmed in Chicago standing in for the film's fictional, Gotham City-inspired setting of "Darkdom" (much as the real Dark Knight was).

• An odd web comic exists in Ansem Retort. For some background, it's a sprite comic based off Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories. For the most part, backgrounds for that game are used for scenery. There are two instances of a background being repeated:
  • The Destiny Islands background has been used as both the scenery for Mexico and the scenery for Hawaii.
  • The background for a room in Alice in Wonderland was used for both an undisclosed location in Eastern Europe and a hotel room in London, England.
• Irregular Webcomic!, being a photo-based webcomic, often uses as backgrounds photos taken by Morgan-Mar on his vacations. The Cliffhangers theme in particular prominently uses photos of various locations in Germany and Italy when the characters are in Germany and Italy, but the first time the story takes them to Paris was before Morgan-Mar had ever visited Paris, resulting in a lot of backgrounds actually being pictures of his trip to Rome as a stand-in for Paris.

• "Mom was worried about my trip to Detroit, I sent her this picture." That picture was actually taken in Cleveland; Windermere is a neighborhood in the east side and very much the Wrong Side of the Tracks as the pic implies.

• The Simpsons: In the episode "Marge and Homer Turn a Couple Play," the Show Within a Show Hunch is set in New York, but filmed in Lethbridge, Alberta.