Although the first X-Men film was shot in Toronto, the following three films in the franchise have all brought their sizable budgets to Vancouver.
Notable locations include St Andrews Church as a hideout for Nightcrawler in X2 (Bryan Singer, 2003), while X-Men: The Last Stand (Brett Ratner, 2006) frames The Sheraton Wall Centre as a ‘cure’ development facility.
Vancouver and its landmarks have been used as a surrogate for American locales, which is usually plausible given the cultural similarities and the city’s geographical diversity. However, X-Men Origins: Wolverine uses special effects to transform the University of British Columbia’s Buchanan Tower into an even more distant location: a guerrilla military base in Lagos, Nigeria…
The full 300 word version of this scene location analysis is published in World Film Locations Vancouver, edited by Rachel Walls, published by Intellect Books, 2013.
Carl Wilson 