Filmed in NYC
A map of New York City told through the films shot in it.
Explore it first. Then read the story behind it.
I walk through movie & TV sets every day.
I watched The Devil Wears Prada 2 the other day and kept recognizing the streets, the corners, the blocks I walk through all the time. And it wasn’t just that one film. The more I thought about it, the more I realized how many movies and shows I’ve watched were shot in places I’ve actually stood. New York has been the backdrop of so much of what I’ve seen on screen, and I’d never really noticed how much until I started looking.
So I built a map of it. Filmed in NYC plots the movies and shows shot across the city, from Goodfellas to Joker to Suits. You can search by decade, filter by genre, and watch the city fill up with the films that used it as a set. Each pin is a place that became a scene.
A different New York every time you look.
The map pulls real film location data and plots it onto an interactive surface you can explore by era, genre, mood, and more. Built with AI-assisted coding using a React + Vite + Leaflet stack, with CartoDB’s dark basemap as the canvas.
You can pan through Manhattan, zoom into Brooklyn, scrub the timeline, or filter to just thrillers shot in the 90s. Every interaction reveals another layer of the city as a set.
By Mood
Filter the city by feeling
Sometimes you don't want a genre, you want a feeling. The Mood lens recolors the map by emotional register: pink romance, red tension, blue loneliness, the quiet glow of melancholy. Each pin radiates its mood as a soft halo, so the whole city reads like a map of how it feels rather than what was filmed there.
By Era
Watch the city change across decades
The Era lens sorts every pin by period, from black-and-white postwar New York to the gritty paranoia of the seventies to the Marvel-takeover 2010s. It turns the map into a timeline you can read at a glance, and shows how the city's on-screen identity shifted era by era.
By Type
Movies or TV, your call
The Type lens splits the map between theatrical features and series, so you can trace the difference between the New York of cinema and the New York of television. The city has played host to both, and they don't always pick the same corners.
By Rating
Find the city's best
The Rating lens grades every pin by critical score, from all-time masterpieces to solid watches to the mixed bag. The map glows green where the great ones cluster, so you can plan a watchlist by quality, not just location.
By Director
See New York through a filmmaker's eyes
The Director lens maps the city the way its auteurs saw it: Scorsese's Little Italy and Midtown, Spike Lee's Bed-Stuy block, Woody Allen's Upper East Side neuroses. It turns out you can recognize a director by geography alone, and the map makes those signatures visible.
Walk the Path
Walk the scene in real life
Every location is a real place you can actually visit. Open a film and the map traces its scenes one by one, with the exact address, a Street View of how it looks today, and the line between reel and real drawn right across the city. Switch to Walk IRL and it becomes a route you can follow on foot, turning any film into a walking tour of the New York it was shot in.
What I took from building Filmed in NYC.
- A city you live in changes shape when you start looking at it through the films shot in it. The map isn’t about discovery so much as recognition.
- AI-assisted coding kept the build fast, but the design decisions, what to filter by, how to pace the timeline, what counts as a “scene” were the parts that took the most care.
- Maps work hardest when each pin is the answer to a question someone might already be asking. Here: “Where was that filmed in New York?”