Movie Scene Map

Open data and the MCP endpoint

Everything on this map, downloadable in one file, plus a live endpoint an AI assistant can query directly. No account, no key, no rate limit worth mentioning.

The files

32,211 filming locations across 177 countries, for 22,458 films and series, 2,163 video games and every anime and manga beside them. Rebuilt on every deploy, so these are whatever the map is showing today.

Licence: the facts are Wikidata's, released as CC0, and the arrangement here adds no claim on top. Photographs are on Wikimedia Commons under their own terms and are linked, not bundled. A credit is welcome and not required.

One thing is deliberately not in these files: the sentences the site quotes to say what was shot at a place. They are verbatim English Wikipedia, which is CC BY-SA 4.0, and bundling share-alike text into a download offered as CC0 would make that offer false. They stay on the pages, in quotation marks, each linked to its article, where the licence they arrive under can be honoured.

Two things to read before you use it

Video games, anime and manga were filmed nowhere. The 2,163 games in here, and every anime and manga beside them, are placed by narrative location (P840), which is where the story is set, while every film and series is placed by filming location (P915). Every row carries that distinction in its kind and relation columns. Anything that reprints this data without keeping them apart publishes a false claim.

A place is not a scene. P915 records that a production filmed at a place and stops there. Which scene was shot where is not in the data, so it is not in these files either, and it must not be inferred from them. In the same spirit, 870 productions are recorded only at country level: they appear with their countries and no coordinates, because that is genuinely all that is known.

Two kinds of evidence, in separate columns. Most production–place links are Wikidata statements. Some are places named in the production's English Wikipedia Filming section, where the prose knows more than the statements do; those ship in their own columns (wiki_place_slugs on a production, wiki_productions on a place) and are never merged into the statement columns. Anything that reprints this data has to keep that separation or it upgrades a sentence into a database record.

The MCP endpoint

A read-only Model Context Protocol server over the same data, at https://moviescenemap.com/mcp. Streamable HTTP, stateless, no authentication. Eight tools: where a production was filmed, what was filmed at a place, what was filmed near a coordinate, searches over both sides, the ranking, the country list and the statistics. 

{
"mcpServers": {
"filmmap": {
"type": "http",
"url": "https://moviescenemap.com/mcp"
}
}
}

The two rules above are built into the endpoint rather than left to the reader: every record it returns carries the filmed at or set in distinction, and the server says so again in its own instructions, because an assistant will only know if it is told.

City filming permits

Some pins come from the filming permits that cities publish as open data. Each such pin says so, with the permit's address and the city as its link, and a person read every match between a permit's title and a production on this map before it was used.

Adapted from these datasets:

Only the pins from the two public domain datasets, San Francisco's and West Hollywood's, are in the CC0 files above. The others carry conditions a CC0 file cannot pass on (credit, share alike or terms of use), so they are shown on the site with their source named and left out of the downloads.

Paris publishes its permits under the Open Database License, which asks that a database built from them be offered under the same licence. The pins taken from them are that database, so they are a file of their own, under the ODbL: paris-permit-pins.csv.

Contains information from Lieux de tournage à Paris, which is made available here under the Open Database License (ODbL).

The City of Chicago asks for this notice:

This site provides applications using data that has been modified for use from its original source, www.cityofchicago.org, the official website of the City of Chicago. The City of Chicago makes no claims as to the content, accuracy, timeliness, or completeness of any of the data provided at this site. The data provided at this site is subject to change at any time. It is understood that the data provided at this site is being used at one’s own risk.

Where it comes from

Every row traces to a Wikidata item and links it. Nothing here is scraped from listicles and nothing is generated. What the atlas covers, and what it deliberately leaves out, is written up on the about page.