When the cameras are rolling, a movie or TV set typically buzzes with activity – but what happens when the clapperboard snaps shut for the final time? There are some amazing spots around the world that once played host to famous actors, but post-production were left to rack and ruin. Others come back from the brink as tourist attractions. Here's our selection of the coolest abandoned movie and TV sets around the world.
Built in the 1940s by Hollywood moviemakers to resemble a typical late-1800s Old West town, Pioneertown is a one-of-a-kind film set. Its main feature is the four-block-long Mane Street, but unlike other movie sets that typically just feature the façades, this one was built as a real, living town. Set 125 miles (201km) east of Los Angeles, Pioneertown played host to the production crew of more than 50 films and TV shows during its heyday in the 1940s and 1950s.
Featured in various The Cisco Kid films and countless Gene Autry flicks, including Silver Canyon (1951) and Riders in the Sky (1949), Pioneertown's luck as a film set started to run out in the 1960s due to a decline in western viewership. But it soon became a destination in its own right. Today, it has a permanent population of around 400 and visitors come to spend the night at the Pioneertown Motel (a rustic 20-room inn), dine at Pappy and Harriet’s Pioneertown Palace and explore the Pioneertown Film Museum.
The seafaring epic Pirates of the Caribbean first came swashbuckling onto movie screens in 2003. Nearly 20 years later, the franchise is still going strong, having grossed more than £3.2 billion ($4.5bn) at the box office. An authentic piece of movie history exists at the hotel and restaurant Wallilabou Anchorage on Caribbean island St Vincent’s west coast. The original set was built around the establishment and it still has props from Captain Jack Sparrow’s escape sequence in the first film.
The Hunger Games (2012), an adaption of Suzanne Collins’ young adult novels, tells the story of a society divided into poverty-stricken districts and forced to take part in an annual battle. Henry River Mill Village, a former cotton mill town in North Carolina, serves as District 12, the hometown of the film’s heroine Katniss Everdeen, played by Jennifer Lawrence.
The film crews have long departed the heritage-listed textile mill village, but these days fans of the franchise can usually join guided tours of the 72-acre site (which was originally built in 1905), taking in the abandoned brick company store and the old mill house. Serious fans can even spend the night in a two-bedroom cabin.
Mel Gibson’s The Patriot (2000) is set during the American Revolutionary War and was filmed over 100 days across the state of South Carolina. Fans of the film will recognise Cypress Gardens as the Old Spanish Mission Black Swamp Militia's secret island headquarters. This man-made swampland north of Charleston also features in romantic drama The Notebook (2004), the film adaptation of Nicholas Sparks’ 1996 novel, in which Rachel McAdams and Ryan Gosling play lovers separated by the Second World War and class prejudices.
Today, the proprietor of the land on which the set was built allows visitors to wander around and there's even a café and a guesthouse here. Like many film sets, this site wasn’t built to last and is gradually becoming a victim of southeast Iceland’s vicious winter weather, which has caused the wooden structures to moulder. Still, for now, the huddle of buildings is a spectacular site framed against the region's stark landscape.
Full Metal Jacket, Stanley Kubrick’s 1987 wartime film about America’s ill-fated conflict with Vietnam, wasn’t filmed in southeast Asia at all. The film’s iconic battle scenes were actually shot more than 6,000 miles (9,656km) away on London’s Isle of Dogs, where Kubrick and his team transformed decommissioned coal works factory Beckton Gas Works into a Vietnamese city.
In one of cinema’s most nerve-wracking moments, the platoon of American marines are tasked with clearing the city of Viet Cong and snipers. Kubrick had the whole gas works site selectively destroyed for the drama, and also decorated it with latticework and suitable advertising boards to make it a believable Vietnamese cityscape.
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Kevin Costner stars as Ray Kinsella, a novice corn farmer turned baseball hero, in Field of Dreams, the 1989 film adaptation of WP Kinsella’s 1982 novel Shoeless Joe. The film has become a cult classic and scenes for the movie were shot on farms near Dyersville, Iowa.
The film's tight shooting schedule didn't allow time for grass to grow on its own, so ground experts who’d worked on two of America’s largest sports stadiums – the Dodger Stadium and the Rose Bowl – were drafted in to help create the perfect set, including painting the turf a vivid shade of green.
Most of the scenes were shot on two farms and after filming one of the landowners, Don Lansing, decided to keep the set intact and open it up to the public. Lansing sold the land to Go The Distance Baseball in 2012 and it remains open to tourists. Visitors can typically wander around the field and tour the Lansing Family Farm House.
Blue Cloud Ranch in Santa Clarita has served as the setting for countless films and TV shows including the Iron Man franchise and American Sniper (2014). It’s also one of the locations used for 2012’s Zero Dark Thirty, a semi-fictional account of the events leading up to the death of Osama bin Laden.
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Despite being set in the American Old West, many of cinema's great spaghetti westerns weren’t filmed in the United States at all. In fact, the Tabernas desert near the southern Spanish town of Almería served as the set for countless cowboy classics. The genre was made famous by legendary Italian director Sergio Leone whose films include 1960s classics The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, A Fistful of Dollars and For a Few Dollars More, all starring actor Clint Eastwood.
Leone discovered the site near Almería in 1964, and he and his team constructed life-sized Wild West-style towns in the middle of the European desert that served as the backdrop for many films. The sets are still in use today: fans of Nickelodeon's Lost in the West and BBC’s Doctor Who might recognise the location.
Now known as Oasys MiniHollywood, this abandoned filming set has been converted into a Wild West theme park and occasionally a Western-themed wedding venue. The site is also a zoological reserve, home to a large number of species in danger of extinction.
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The brooding mountains and lush valleys of New Zealand serve as the backdrop for much of Sir Peter Jackson's epic The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit film series. In 1998, the native New Zealander's team of location scouts were searching for somewhere to recreate the rolling hills and green pastures of Hobbiton. They happened upon the Alexander farm, a 1,250-acre sheep farm in lush Waikato region, during an aerial search.
Hobbiton in The Shire, the hometown of JRR Tolkien's diminutive heroes, was created especially for the movies and is located in the northern part of the North Island. Today the site is a fully-fledged tourist attraction – the Hobbiton Movie Set – and visitors can typically take tours that sweep past sights including Bilbo and Frodo Baggins' home and the Green Dragon Inn.
George Lucas’ intergalactic saga Star Wars was a defining moment in the history of cinema and has spawned countless other films set in galaxies far, far away. Desert planet Tatooine plays a major role throughout the franchise as the home of Anakin Skywalker, the young Jedi who grows up to become the villainous Darth Vader. And the fictional name is a clue to its real-life location...
Tatooine is named after Tataouine, a city in southern Tunisia. The city features most predominantly in the first of the prequels, Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace (1999), and is still a popular attraction to this day, due to the unique cave architecture of its Berber population.
Fans of the franchise might also recognise Hotel Sidi Idriss, around two hours north of Tataouine, which served as the Lars homestead where Luke Skywalker grew up. This unique accommodation features in A New Hope (the first film in the franchise) and returns in both Attack of the Clones and the last film in the franchise, The Rise of Skywalker.
Part of the Marvel franchise, Iron Man first hit our screens in 2008 and actor Robert Downey Jr won hearts with his performance of the eponymous superhero. The landscapes of Kunar Province, Afghanistan, where Iron Man's alter ego Tony Stark is captured after a raid on the army convoy, were actually shot in beauty spot Alabama Hills in Lone Pine, California.
In Iron Man 2 (2010), Stark Industry’s airfield is actually Edwards Air Force Base, about 30 miles (48km) northeast of Lancaster in the Mojave Desert, California. The base is an on-screen regular, having appeared in The Right Stuff (1983), Armageddon (1998) and the Transformers movies too.
Actors Jack Black and Michael Cera buddy up in 2009’s Year One, a tongue-in-cheek comedy about a pair of early hunter-gatherers. Parts of the movie were filmed near the town of Sibley in northwest Louisiana, where the biblical city of Sodom was brought to life (as pictured). It's a gloriously wild location, with the set itself surrounded by sand and hemmed in with trees.
Martin Scorsese's 2002 epic Gangs of New York is set in mid-19th-century New York's slums and stars Leonardo DiCaprio, Daniel Day-Lewis and Cameron Diaz. The characters are caught up in a long-standing Catholic-Protestant feud on the street of Five Points, Manhattan, but the movie set was a long way from the Big Apple. The film was actually shot in Rome, Italy at the famous Cinecittà (Cinema City), still the largest film studio in Europe and the heart of Italian cinema to this day.
Production designer Dante Ferretti went all out when recreating this swathe of mid-19th-century New York architecture. His masterpiece spread out over an entire mile (1.6km) and comprised an area of Lower Manhattan, complete with a pocket of the East River waterfront and two full-sized sailing ships. The studio was also used as the setting for the historical drama TV series Rome, with the ancient world set pictured here.
Acclaimed director Tim Burton’s Big Fish (2003) is the tear-jerking story of a son’s reconciliation with his dying father. Burton and his team had the fictional town of Spectre constructed from scratch rather than use a real-world location as the set. The town was built on Jackson Lake Island, along the banks of the Alabama River near the town of Montgomery, and still stands today.
Tourists can typically walk in the footsteps of the film's blockbuster names (which include Ewan McGregor, Marion Cotillard and Helena Bonham Carter) on the now deserted and somewhat eerie set, which today is overgrown with wildlife.
Not many people know that the late, great comedian and actor Robin Williams also played the eponymous character in the 1980 film adaption of the Popeye comics. The rugged Mediterranean island of Malta served as the principal location for the spinach-guzzling anti-hero's escapades.
When the life-sized town, which was constructed in Anchor Bay in the northwest of the island, was abandoned after filming, the Maltese government decided to revive it as Popeye Village. The family-friendly theme park is now one of the island’s most popular attractions.
The 2006 horror movie The Hills Have Eyes kept audiences up at night with its tale of a family left stranded in the New Mexico wilderness. The stretch of desert outside the city of Ouarzazate in Morocco doubled for the American West in the film, and the Gas Haven petrol station, where the family first hear of a shortcut from the store’s creepy clerk, still sits sun-faded in the stark wilderness.
Gas Haven isn't the only movie location in the area. It was actually the producers of Lawrence of Arabia (1962) who first saw the potential of the desert outside of Ouarzazate. They needed a location to stand in for western Asia, and with consistent weather and a remote position near the Sahara, Morocco's wilderness fitted the bill. But it wasn't until 1983 that these studios officially opened, providing sets for re-enactments of biblical locations, ancient civilisations and brilliant works of fiction alike.
In terms of acreage, Atlas Corporation Studios is tipped as the largest in the world, still attracting filmmakers from around the globe. When a set is finished with, it's simply left behind and the next one built. But the harsh sun and damage from the encroaching sands mean the buildings deteriorate quickly, giving the whole area an eerie overtone. Pictured here is a faux Egyptian temple.
Four months after its last episode aired in July 2022, the Aussie soap opera Neighbours has opened its abandoned set – filled with discarded props as well as other exterior locations – to the public. Nestled in Melbourne’s suburbs sits the famous Ramsay Street, which visitors can discover by booking The Official Neighbours Tour.
Neighbours fans will be taken to several spots where they can reminisce over iconic moments of the TV series. Visit as-seen-on-TV sights such as the Lassister’s shopping complex, Harold’s Store and Cafe, local pub the Waterhole and pretty Lassister’s Lake.
But that’s not all. The tour will also take you down Power Road, where you'll find even more Neighbours landmarks, including Fitzgerald Motors, Grease Monkeys and Dial-A-Kyle. Fans can discover Neighbours props and memorabilia at The Erinsborough Depot too. On-set selfies are encouraged, so you'll have plenty of great memories to share with the folks back home.
Nestled in the Malibu Creek State Park lies a bit of Hollywood history – the set of beloved TV show M*A*S*H. The comedy-drama series transformed the dusty California location along Crags Road into a Korean War battlefield. Although the medic tents of the series are long gone, fans will still recognise elements from the show.
To see the location for yourself, set out from Malibu Creek's main parking area for a 5-mile (8km) round trip hike. Here, fans of the show can find broken-down cars used in M*A*S*H, with the medical truck in this image in particularly great shape. There's also the famous signpost showcasing distances and directions of various cities such as Boston, Tokyo or Coney Island. For travel lovers, it makes for a great photo op.