California Doubling / Vancouver

California Doubling involving Vancouver. Vancouver is the third biggest filming city in North America, and due to tax incentives, it's regularly used as a stand-in for other cities.

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In general

• Because of how prevalent Vancouver and its surrounding area are as a filming location, many local landmarks are notable for being character actors in and of themselves. For instance, the Aerospace Campus at the British Columbia Institute of Technology is regularly used for government facilities; Simon Fraser University is regularly used as a military base or a shady corporation headquarters; Hatley Park National Historic Site has played everything from medieval castles to fancy private schools; and the University of British Columbia almost always plays a university, albeit usually one that's located anywhere but Canada.
• Just about any scene in any cop show filmed in Vancouver where the criminals are 'down at the docks' or 'in the old warehouse district' is set in Steveston, Richmond, which used to be a fishing village but is now a tourist center, and still has a lot of the fish processing warehouses(now mostly art galleries and souvenir shops).

Films — Live-Action

• The 6th Day was partially filmed in Vancouver; exterior shots of the cloning company's headquarters are actually the main branch of the Vancouver Public Library.
• Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem took place in a version of Gunnison, Colorado that has a suspiciously large number of evergreen pines. (That area of the state is mostly semi-arid scrubland in real life.)
• Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever weirdly inverts and subverts Vancouver Doubling by being set in Vancouver without using any notable landmarks to make it look like Vancouver (except for Library Square), and doing things like having the city police driving black cars and otherwise looking nothing like their real-world counterparts.
• Sort-of done in Batman (1989): the movie was filmed in England, but a map of Gotham City that Vicki Vale uses is actually a map of Vancouver.
• Blade: Trinity is very obviously filmed in Vancouver, to the extent of not changing signage, using major and distinctive features, etc.
• Fantastic Four (2005) has Vancouver doubling for New York City. The ground-floor entrance of the Baxter Building is the Marine Building (which was also in Blade Trinity), and the intersection in the scene with the flipped cop car was made to look like New York with fake (and highly confusing) subway entrances and the hiding of an enormous Canadian Flag and the signage of a CIBC bank.
• Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan, despite the title and setting, was mostly filmed in Vancouver. The original script called for scenes taking place at Madison Square Garden and on the Brooklyn Bridge, but budget constraints forced them to shoot primarily in Canada (only the Times Square scene was actually filmed on location), while most of the film is spent on a cruise ship traveling to New York. The mountainous Canadian terrain is very noticeable when the characters are boarding the ship in what is supposed to be New Jersey.
• The plot of Godzilla (2014) mainly takes place on the West Coast of the United States, but was filmed mainly in Vancouver. Hilariously, Seamus McGarvey, the cinematographer, accidentally stumbled on a nearby lakeside set for Dawn of the Planet of the Apes that looked very similar to the one for Godzilla, and it took him a while to realize he was in the wrong place.
• Diary of a Wimpy Kid (and its first two sequels) had Vancouver stand in for a generic Everytown, America. Averted with the fourth film, which was filmed in Georgia.
• An episode of Every Frame a Painting, "Vancouver Never Plays Itself" shows numerous examples. The creator, a native Vancouverite, cited Homeward Bound II: Lost In San Francisco as "the first time a film lied to me" and was particularly annoyed at Fifty Shades of Grey for using the University of British Columbia to play Washington State University in Vancouver, Washington.
• Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan, which starts in New Jersey and has at least the alleyways of New York filmed in Vancouver.
• The Interview takes place in several different locations but was shot almost entirely in Vancouver, the hometown of writer and star Seth Rogen.
  • The main characters' TV studio was actually the main CBC building in downtown Vancouver.
  • Kim Jong-un's presidential palace is actually Robson Square, across the street from the Vancouver Art Gallery, with several green screens put up to mask out surrounding buildings.
  • Vancouver's Chinatown doubled for Dandong, China.
    • The Chinese night market is really just the Richmond Night Market; Richmond is a city immediately south of Vancouver where a full 50% of the population identifies as Chinese.
    • The decrepit Chinese village Seth Rogen's character travels to is a real place (though the mountains were added digitally) on the south shore of Richmond called Finn Slough, a fishing village founded in the 1880s by Finnish immigrants; people still live there!
• In I, Robot, Vancouver portrays a futuristic Chicago.
• It's a Wonderful Knife (2023): The film is set in Angel Falls, a fictional American town, but was filmed in Vancouver, Canada.
• Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol has Vancouver fill in for Seattle.
• The parts of Mr. Magoo that take place in America were filmed in Vancouver; the museum in the film is actually the lobby of the main branch of the Vancouver Public Library with museum-type decorations scattered around.
• The real world scenes in The Neverending Story were shot in Vancouver. In fact, the Gastown Steam Clock can be seen during the iconic scene where Falkor and Bastian chase down the bullies from the start of the film.
• Ramona and Beezus substitutes Vancouver for Portland, Oregon.
• The Jackie Chan movie Rumble in the Bronx is shot in Vancouver rather than New York City. This becomes especially apparent during a beach scene when the lofty majestic volcanic Cascade Mountains can be seen in the background...
• Scooby-Doo: Monsters Unleashed was filmed in Vancouver, but is set in the fictional US town of Coolsville.
• Wonder is set in New York, but with the exception of a few exteriors, was shot entirely in Vancouver.
• Shoot to Kill both plays this trope straight and averts it; most of the film was shot in British Columbia, but the film's set on the West Coast of the US... until the characters cross into B.C. for the final act. It still finds time to play it straight - in a case of Vancouver itself being doubled, the climactic underwater fight just off the coast of the city between Sidney Poitier and Clancy Brown was filmed in The Bahamas!
• Stay Tuned is primarily set in Seattle, Washington, but was primarily filmed in Vancouver.
• TRON: Legacy was filmed in Vancouver but (presumably) takes place somewhere in Silicon Valley, California. If you happened to have seen the movie at the Scotiabank Theatre in downtown Vancouver, as soon as you walked out of the cinema you'd be looking out a large window at exactly the spot where they digitally inserted Encom Tower.
• Turkey Hollow: The film is set in the US Pacific Northwest. It was filmed in Vancouver, Canada.
• The first installment of the Twilight series, set in Washington's Olympic Peninsula, was filmed in Portland, but the next two films were shot in Vancouver. The second half of Breaking Dawn was initially planned to be filmed in Vancouver as well, but because of a tsunami warning caused by the 2011 Tohoku earthquake, it was moved to Squamish.
• In X2: X-Men United and X-Men: The Last Stand, Xavier's School For Gifted Youngsters in upstate New York is actually in Vancouver.
  • The exterior of the school and most of the more "normal" corridors above ground were filmed at Hatley Castle in Victoria, British Columbia. There was a common joke on set about the "magic elevator" that took you from Victoria to Vancouver (which in the movie took characters to the labs below, which were located on a set in Vancouver).
  • In X-Men: The Last Stand, the scene with the protest outside the cure clinic was not in front of a massive skyscraper, but a very nondescript two-floor building.
  • Jean Grey's childhood home is in the Vancouver suburb of Tsawwassen.

Live-Action TV

• Though supposedly set in the US, the fact that 21 Jump Street is shot in Vancouver is made by the fact that the extras/bit parts were hired locally and thus do decidedly non-US things like say "grade 3" instead of "3rd grade" and write graffiti with words ending in "-our" instead of "-or". And the "Hastings" bus in the credits. (Hastings is a well-known area of Vancouver.)
• The Babysitters Club 2020 has Vancouver and the surrounding area double for the fictional town of Stoneybrook, Connecticut.
• The early seasons of Sliders were filmed in Vancouver.
• The X-Files moved from Vancouver to Hollywood in the course of production.
  • Some locals have a "Don't go into Stanley Park!" gag because before the move to LA, almost every single forest scene on the show was filmed inside the park (which is big enough to have a rather sizable community of Park People). For many years, the white X that Mulder spray paints on the side of the road in the pilot was still visible, too - this was pointed out in the seventh season finale.
  • For the second X-Files movie, The X-Files: I Want to Believe, they trucked in huge amounts of real snow to decorate several blocks of Vancouver, which was highly surreal.
• Supernatural, which is supposed to be set across the United States, is filmed primarily in and around Vancouver. If the episode in question takes place in your native state, it can be hilarious.
  • Lampshaded in "Hollywood Babylon", an episode set in Hollywood. One character complains, "Does this seem like swimming pool weather to you? Man, it's practically Canadian."
  • Spoofed when an archangel's spell sends the Winchesters into our world, where their adventures are the TV show we all know and love. They tell a guy to drive them into town, and are surprised when they end up in Vancouver.
• Smallville, Kansas sure has a lot of geography that would be more like somewhere in the Pacific Northwest (with thick forests and mountain lakes) than in Kansas.
  • One episode was set in Seattle with Clark hunting down a Phantom Zone escapee. He spent most of the episode snooping around the docks.
  • Another episode has Vancouver's Gastown neighborhood masquerading as Paris.
• Shōgun: Both Vancouver and the UK filled in for early 17th century Japan.
• Lampshaded in Stargate SG-1 when Jack O'Neill, emerging from the gate, asks "why do they always look like Canada?"
  • Inverted in regards to the area surrounding Cheyenne Mountain. While the show has several reusable shots of the Mountain itself, whenever an episode took place in Colorado Springs, it looked suspiciously flat or rural. This despite the fact that Colorado Springs has lots of hills and is extremely urban/suburban.
  • Averted in one episode of Stargate Atlantis, which had a scene actually set in Vancouver.
  • And justified in many cases, as most of the planets the Atlantis crew visit were originally terraformed by the Ancients, who probably just set everything up the way they liked it. On every planet.
    • It can get pretty hilarious watching the previous three shows (Smallville, Supernatural and Stargate SG-1) and realising that everywhere in the United States, not to mention almost every planet in the Milky Way galaxy, looks exactly like the Smallville countryside, or Metropolis.
  • The highway motorcycle scene in the episode "Memento" cuts a frame or two too late to avoid showing a road sign indicating how far it is before you reach Surrey.
  • Another example in Stargate Atlantis, the pilot episode has a long sequence supposedly taking place in Antarctica, which (A) was actually filmed using a glacier in British Columbia, and (B) has a supposedly US military helicopter... with a giant Canadian registration painted prominently on it in several places. To be fair, most of the audience has no idea what the sequence of five letters is.
• Lampshaded in The L Word, (a show which films Vancouver for LA), when one character proclaims "It's no use, Vancouver just can't look like LA."
• Also lampshaded in Highlander: The Series. The North American episodes generally take place in a single city where the cars have Washington license plates, and other things also strongly imply the city is in the United States, but the city is not named. Since all these episodes were filmed in and around Vancouver, the fans started calling the city Seacouver. This name later appeared in the series a few times, such as on a newspaper.
• Vancouver doubling specifically for Seattle.
  • Dead Like Me. Notably, the restaurant used for Der Waffle Haus also played a representation of the "Ascended Plane" in a Stargate SG-1 episode.
  • Dark Angel, set in a 20 Minutes into the Future Seattle was almost entirely filmed in Vancouver. The only shots not filmed there were the opening sequence ones that had the Space Needle in them.
  • John Doe
  • The 4400
  • Kyle XY
  • IZombie
    • The iZombie episode "Method Head", which features a Show Within a Show that takes place in Portland but is filmed in Seattle, alludes to the trope, with Liv explaining that it's filmed there because of tax breaks.
• An episode of The Sentinel, which was set in Washington, had a scene in one episode by a big bell, albeit one with a very visible 'RCMP' stamped on it.
• Fringe is set in Boston, but shot its pilot in Toronto and the remainder of Season 1^note Plus an Out of Order episode airing in S2 in New York City. New York's repeal of the tax credit producers had been using meant that they had to move production to Vancouver for Season 2.
  • After moving there, it resulted in moments that could inspire massive rage in Bostonians, like a evergreen-filled suburban neighborhood being identified as Beacon Hill◊
    • The show has been mocked constantly in Boston for shots like this. It's a little baffling since they keep insisting on citing specific Boston landmarks, instead of just not mentioning the setting very often.
  • The Alternate Universe Fringe Division is based in the (very cool looking) Vancouver Public Library.
  • Whenever the series needed a train station, Pacific Central Station would get used. The same station was used to double for Boston South Station as well as two alternate universe versions of Newark Penn Station (as well as a few unspecified commuter stations). This leads to some interesting scenes, such as vintage stainless steel railroad equipment being used to double for external shots of commuter cars (even while more modern equipment is used for the interior shots)...though the coffee shop where Fauxlivia gets her coffee in Newark is still operational.
• Psych is filmed in parts of British Columbia, including Vancouver, though the show is set in... southern California.
  • This occasionally leads to the hilarious scene of Shawn, Gus, and the other main characters walking around in southern California garb whilst random people in the background are clearly wearing parkas.
  • It's actually lampshaded at the end of the episode Lock, Stock, Some Smoking Barrels and Burton Guster's Goblet of Fire. The episode was set in London, but Gus remarks "we might as well have been in British Colombia" since he and Shawn didn't get to see much of the city.
• Human Target is set in San Francisco, but filmed in Vancouver. It's quite a good match in terms of terrain & climate, but still looks subtly off.
  • Amusingly enough, In an episode where Chance must escort someone to Seattle, the Seattle scenes at the end look perfectly plausible because of the essentially identical landscape.
• The show Eureka takes place in the fictional town of Eureka (which is not the same as the actual city of Eureka, CA), but is filmed in a variety of locations outside Vancouver.
• Hellcats has the good city of Vancouver playing Memphis.
• In the Doctor Who Made-for-TV Movie, Vancouver plays San Francisco, but they might as well have acknowledged they were in Vancouver for all the difference it would have made. It only seems like San Francisco in that there's a Friendly Local Chinatown and a guy almost went to a costume party dressed as Wild Bill Hickok (but then the Doctor stole his costume). In the Chase Scene, there aren't even any hills to speak of.
• This trope is lampshaded in Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip when Danny says they can't afford to make a movie without a bond and Matt responds "We make some budget cuts, we shoot in Vancouver." (Danny refuses, because "Vancouver doesn't look like anything. It doesn't even look like Vancouver. It looks like Boston, California.")
• Pretty Little Liars has the rare distinction of getting two entries in this trope, as the pilot was filmed in Vancouver.
• On Once Upon a Time the east coast town of Storybrooke, Maine is played by Vancouver (as are the Enchanted Forest and its environs).
• The Arrowverse is almost exclusively filmed in Vancouver standing in for Star City, Central City, National City (from season 2 onward), Gotham, and Smallville. National City was formerly filmed in Los Angeles when Supergirl was aired on CBS, but moved to Vancouver following the Channel Hop for budget reasons. The Pacific Northwest setting perfectly fits Star City, which is located near Seattle, and somewhat fits National City as it's still on the coast (though one can tell that the city's environment seems to become a lot greener since season 2), but it hardly fits Central City's supposed Midwestern location.^note in the DCU, Central City stands in for Kansas City and the adaptation still places it somewhere in Missouri.
• The 100 has the woods of British Columbia double for what's left of Washington, DC a century after a global nuclear war.
• The Titanic (1996) miniseries was shot there - despite the fact the actual ship sunk on the other side of North America!
• Most of The Man in the High Castle was shot in Vancouver (the remainder was shot in Seattle). The third season at least bothers to digitally insert Rocky Mountains local to Denver, Colorado into the background of scenes set there.
• Travelers has it for some US city in the Pacific Northwest.
• While the pilot of Lucifer was shot on location in Los Angeles, the other episodes of the first two seasons were shot in Vancouver. It eventually moved back to California due to tax incentives. It gets lampshaded in the Season Three What If? episode "Once Upon a Time," which as a result of Chloe's dad never getting killed in the line of duty she stays an actress instead of becoming a police officer. When she and Lucifer meet, he comments on her films, noting that many of the ones that were supposedly set in LA looked suspiciously like Vancouver.
• Ninja Turtles: The Next Mutation takes place in New York City but was shot in Vancouver.
• The pilot for Monk season 1 was largely filmed with Vancouver standing in for San Francisco. For the rest of season 1, they filmed in Toronto.
• The Disney Channel series The Jersey not only has Vancouver doubling for St. Louis, Missouri, but also practically any U.S. sports venue^note the football stadium scenes are very obviously shot at either BC Place or UBC's Thunderbird Stadium, while Swangard Stadium is poorly disguised as an Olympic track & field stadium in one episode, all leading to numerous instances of Stock Footage Failure.
• Julie and the Phantoms is set in Los Angeles, but filmed in Vancouver and the Vancouver area. Even the scenes at the Orpheum, because Vancouver also has a theatre named the Orpheum.
• Many US-set Lifetime original movies are shot in Vancouver, with lots of Vancouver-based actors appearing over-and-over again, as well as locations getting recycled. Brookswood Secondary School in nearby Langley seems to be the go-to choice for movies set in high schools. Toronto and Ottawa also see a fair share of Lifetime movies as well.
• You Me Her: Portland, Oregon is portrayed by Vancouver, British Columbia.
• The Night Agent: Vancouver doubles as Washington D.C.
• Stingray (1985) took place in various locations as Ray travelled to help people in need, but it was filmed in Vancouver, as well as Calgary.

Tabletop Games

• Explicitly acknowledged and lampshaded in The Dresden Files RPG. The GM's section describes what the makers call "The Vancouver Method" of city design — in other words, just making stuff up as an alternative to doing all the research required to produce an accurate recreation of a city. The lampshading comes in the margin notes written by Harry and Billy.
  Harry: I don't buy it. They couldn't do a TV show based around Chicago in Vancouver.
  Billy: You'd be surprised.

Webcomics

• Lampshading the early X-Files examples is a Running Gag in Monster of the Week, which heralds them with "The rainy pine forests of [place that doesn't have rainy pine forests]!"

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