The Most Beautiful Film Locations in the United States
24 places · updated 14 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful film locations in the United States are Mount Rushmore, Hoover Dam and Mount Rainier. The list covers 24 film locations. Last updated 14 October 2026.
The United States became the world's film location almost by accident: the industry settled in southern California, and within a day's drive lay deserts, mountains, ocean and forest. Hollywood used them all, and later carried its cameras across the continent. The result is a country whose landmarks, from carved mountains to steel skyscrapers, are often known worldwide through the screen before anyone visits them.
New York gave cinema its most famous ending when King Kong climbed the Empire State Building in 1933, and Central Park has appeared in so many films that it has become a set of its own. The Statue of Liberty marked arrivals and endings, never more strikingly than half buried in sand at the close of Planet of the Apes. In San Francisco, Alfred Hitchcock shot Vertigo beneath the Golden Gate Bridge, and the classical rotunda of the Palace of Fine Arts, built for the 1915 exposition, is a favourite backdrop for romance.
The West supplies the grand landscapes. Mount Rushmore staged the finale of North by Northwest, the Hoover Dam has served thrillers and disaster films, and the cliffs of Zion National Park have long framed westerns. Yosemite is the setting of the climbing documentary Free Solo, with El Capitan at its centre. Mount Rainier, an ice-covered volcano above Seattle, and Lake Tahoe, where The Godfather Part II placed the Corleone compound, complete a portrait of a country as wide as its films.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Mount Rushmore | Monument | |
| 2 | Hoover Dam | Dam | |
| 3 | Mount Rainier | Volcano | |
| 4 | El Capitan | Rock formation | |
| 5 | Metropolitan Museum of Art | Museum | |
| 6 | Statue of Liberty | Monument | ✓ |
| 7 | Golden Gate Bridge | Bridge | |
| 8 | Palace of Fine Arts | Folly | |
| 9 | Lake Tahoe | Lake | |
| 10 | Central Park | Urban park | |
| 11 | Empire State Building | Skyscraper | |
| 12 | Zion National Park | National park | |
| 13 | Yosemite National Park | National park | ✓ |
| 14 | Brooklyn Bridge | Bridge | |
| 15 | Lincoln Memorial | Monument | |
| 16 | Badlands National Park | National park | |
| 17 | Chrysler Building | Skyscraper | |
| 18 | Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum | Museum | ✓ |
| 19 | Grand Central Terminal | Railway station | |
| 20 | Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park | Canyon | |
| 21 | Mammoth Cave | Cave | |
| 22 | New York Public Library Main Branch | Library building | |
| 23 | Caddo Lake | Reservoir | |
| 24 | Dead Horse Point State Park | Scenic viewpoint |
01 Mount Rushmore
United States · 29 km from Rapid City43.879° N 103.459° W
Dean Franklin · Public domain The four faces on Mount Rushmore were not the original plan. Gutzon Borglum's first brief called for figures tied to the American West — Lewis and Clark, their guide Sacagawea, and Lakota leaders Red Cloud and Crazy Horse were all part of early discussions — before Borglum redirected the project toward four presidents on the theory that it would draw broader national interest.
Did you know? Behind Lincoln's head lies an unfinished Hall of Records, where a vault holding 16 enamel panels on American history was sealed in 1998.
02 Hoover Dam
United States · 9.4 km from Boulder City36.016° N 114.738° W
Image by MrUweS from Pixabay Hoover Dam plugs the Black Canyon of the Colorado River on the border between Nevada and Arizona, a curved wall of concrete standing 726 feet (about 221 metres) from its foundation rock to the roadway on its crest. 25 million cubic yards went into the dam alone. It was handed to the federal government in March 1936, more than two years ahead of schedule.
Did you know? The first recorded death on the project, surveyor J. G. Tierney, drowned on 20 December 1922; his son Patrick died there on 20 December 1935.
03 Mount Rainier
United States46.852° N 121.760° W
Image by Kranich17 from Pixabay On a clear day Mount Rainier floats over Seattle and Tacoma like a second horizon; locals simply call it "the Mountain". The volcano rises to about 4,391 metres, and because it stands alone above the lower Cascades it is the most topographically prominent peak in the contiguous United States.
Did you know? The ice-filled summit craters hold the world’s largest volcanic glacier cave network, with nearly 3.2 km of passages.
04 El Capitan
United States37.734° N 119.637° W
Image by carelbron0 from Pixabay El Capitan is the granite wall that greets you at the western end of Yosemite Valley: a single, almost unjointed monolith rising roughly 900 metres from the valley floor to its rounded top.
Did you know? Despite its towering face, El Capitan's summit has only about 3 metres of topographic prominence, because it is attached to higher ground behind.
05 Metropolitan Museum of Art
United States · 7 km from New York City40.779° N 73.963° W
Image by marekr from Pixabay The Metropolitan Museum of Art occupies almost a quarter of a mile of Fifth Avenue along the eastern edge of Central Park, and inside it holds something close to the whole history of art. 5 million works across 17 curatorial departments, from Palaeolithic flints to contemporary painting.
06 Statue of Liberty
United States · 5.5 km from New York City40.689° N 74.044° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by itou365 from Pixabay The name most people reach for is Bartholdi, and that's correct as far as it goes — Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi conceived the whole figure, from her raised torch to the broken chains at her feet, and sculpted the copper skin that visitors actually see, a figure standing some 46 metres from base to torch. What's murkier, and worth untangling, is who built what's actually holding her up.
Did you know? Her copper skin is only about 2.4 millimetres thick across the entire figure.
07 Golden Gate Bridge
United States · 8 km from San Francisco37.820° N 122.479° W
Image by Pexels from Pixabay The bridge's color exists because nobody could agree on one. The steel arrived from the fabricators already coated in a burnt-orange sealant primer meant only to protect it from rust during shipping and assembly. The US Navy, worried about ships colliding with it in fog, wanted it painted black with yellow stripes; the Army Air Corps wanted red-and-white candy-cane bands for aircraft visibility.
Did you know? In 2020 new railing slats began making the bridge hum in strong winds; one analysis found the tones match the notes F, G, A and B.
08 Palace of Fine Arts
United States · 4.8 km from San Francisco37.803° N 122.448° W
Kevin Cole ( en:User:Kevinlcole ) · CC BY 2.0 The Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco was meant to look like a ruin from the start. Bernard Maybeck designed it for the Panama-Pacific International Exposition of 1915 as a quiet place between the crowded fairgrounds and the art galleries, and he took his cue from an etching by Piranesi of a ruined Roman temple and from Arnold Böcklin's painting Isle of the Dead.
Did you know? It is the only structure from the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition still standing on its original site.
09 Lake Tahoe
United States · 24.8 km from Carson City39.083° N 120.033° W
Image by Anwic from Pixabay Lake Tahoe fills a fault-block basin high in the Sierra Nevada, its surface sitting about 1,897 metres above sea level with California on two-thirds of the shore and Nevada on the rest. It is the largest alpine lake in North America and astonishingly deep: 501 metres at its lowest point, second in the United States only to Crater Lake.
Did you know? A drop of water entering Lake Tahoe stays in it for about 650 years on average before leaving.
10 Central Park
United States · 7.2 km from New York City40.782° N 73.966° W
Image by Josmanu1970 from Pixabay Central Park looks natural, but almost none of it is. Every hill, boulder outcrop, lake and winding path was engineered by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, who won a design competition in 1858 with a plan called "Greensward" that treated 843 acres of swampy, rocky Manhattan bedrock as a blank canvas for staged wilderness.
Did you know? Clearing the rocky site reportedly took more gunpowder than was fired at the Battle of Gettysburg.
11 Empire State Building
United States · 3.1 km from New York City40.748° N 73.986° W
Image by Olga_Fil from Pixabay The Empire State Building is the skyscraper against which other tall buildings are still measured, and it earned that status in a single burst of work at the start of the Great Depression. It stands on the west side of Fifth Avenue between 33rd and 34th Streets, on the site of the original Waldorf-Astoria Hotel.
Did you know? On 28 July 1945 a B-25 bomber flying in thick fog struck the north face between the 78th and 80th floors, killing 14 people.
12 Zion National Park
United States37.203° N 112.988° W
- Dark Sky Place
Image by Pexels from Pixabay The cliffs that make Zion look otherworldly are, geologically speaking, fossilised weather. The dominant rock, Navajo Sandstone, started out around 180 million years ago as an enormous field of wind-blown sand dunes — think Sahara-scale — and the diagonal cross-bedding cutting through the rock faces is literally the shape of those ancient dune slopes, frozen in stone.
Did you know? When President Taft protected the canyon in 1909, he gave it the Southern Paiute-derived name Mukuntuweap National Monument; it became Zion only later.
13 Yosemite National Park
United States37.742° N 119.537° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Image by 12019 from Pixabay Few landscapes explain their own making as plainly as Yosemite. The park's 1,187 square miles sit on the granite of the Sierra Nevada batholith, rock that cooled deep underground, was lifted and tilted with the range some ten million years ago, and was then worked over by ice.
Did you know? On rare clear evenings in mid to late February, the setting sun backlights Horsetail Fall on the eastern edge of El Capitan so that it glows orange.
14 Brooklyn Bridge
United States · 1.8 km from New York City40.706° N 73.996° W
Image by laretalo from Pixabay The man who designed the Brooklyn Bridge never saw a single cable strung. In June 1869, while surveying the site, John Roebling had his foot crushed against a piling by an approaching ferry. He refused amputation, treated the wound himself with a water cure of his own devising, and died of tetanus three weeks later — leaving the project to his 32-year-old son, Washington, before construction had properly begun.
Did you know? Its main span of about 486 metres made it the longest suspension bridge in the world when it opened in 1883.
15 Lincoln Memorial
United States · 3.6 km from Washington38.889° N 77.050° W
Image by MarkThomas from Pixabay The Lincoln Memorial closes the western end of the National Mall like the temple at the end of a sacred way. The architect Henry Bacon gave it the form of a Greek Doric temple in white Yule marble from Colorado, ringed by 36 fluted columns, one for each state of the Union at the time of Lincoln's death, with the names of the 48 states of 1922 carved above.
Did you know? The spot where Martin Luther King Jr. stood in 1963, on a landing eighteen steps below the statue, was engraved in 2003.
16 Badlands National Park
United States43.750° N 102.500° W
Image by victortran0107 from Pixabay The Lakota called this country makȟóšiča, "bad land", and the name stuck in every language that followed. From the rim of the prairie the ground simply falls away into a maze of pinnacles, saw-toothed ridges and fluted buttes, banded in cream, rust, pink and grey. The colours are a timetable.
Did you know? Scenes of Dances with Wolves (1990) and Thunderheart (1992) were filmed among its formations.
17 Chrysler Building
United States · 3.7 km from New York City40.751° N 73.976° W
Image by RJA1988 from Pixabay The Chrysler Building is the purest expression of the optimism New York built for itself at the end of the 1920s. It was designed by William Van Alen and paid for by Walter P. Chrysler out of his own pocket, as an investment for his children rather than as a headquarters for his car company.
Did you know? Van Alen sued Walter Chrysler for his unpaid architect's fee and won, but the lawsuit hurt his reputation so badly that he received few major commissions afterwards.
18 Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
United States · 7.5 km from New York City40.783° N 73.959° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
Jean-Christophe BENOIST · CC BY 3.0 The Guggenheim on Fifth Avenue is a museum people visit as much for the building as for the art. Frank Lloyd Wright designed it as a top-heavy spiral that widens as it rises, a shape that looks nothing like the apartment blocks around it on the Upper East Side, facing Central Park.
Did you know? By 1958 Wright and the director James Johnson Sweeney refused to speak to each other, so Harry Guggenheim had to relay every message between them.
19 Grand Central Terminal
United States · 3.8 km from New York City40.753° N 73.977° W
Image by jplenio from Pixabay Grand Central Terminal is a commuter station that became one of the most visited buildings in the world: some 21 million people came in 2018 just to look, not counting passengers. It stands at 42nd Street and Park Avenue in Midtown Manhattan and opened in 1913, the third station of that name on the site, built by the New York Central Railroad.
Did you know? The constellations on the Main Concourse ceiling are largely painted back to front; a commuter noticed the mistake in 1913, and it has never been corrected.
20 Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park
United States · 16.6 km from Montrose38.580° N 107.728° W
- Dark Sky Place
Image by misterfarmer from Pixabay Few canyons in North America combine such depth with such narrowness. In western Colorado the Gunnison River has sawn straight down through some of the oldest rock on the continent, leaving a gorge that reaches 2,722 feet (829 m) deep at Warner Point but narrows to only about 40 feet (12 m) at river level in the Narrows.
Did you know? In the deepest, narrowest stretches of the canyon, direct sunlight reaches the river for only about 33 minutes a day.
21 Mammoth Cave
United States · 37.3 km from Bowling Green37.183° N 86.100° W
Daniel Schwen · CC BY-SA 4.0 The most accurate map of Mammoth Cave for nearly forty years was drawn from memory by a man who wasn't free to leave it.
Did you know? Remains of an ancient shark, Saivodus striatus, comparable in size to a modern great white were identified in the cave's limestone in 2020.
22 New York Public Library Main Branch
United States · 3.7 km from New York City40.753° N 73.982° W
ajay_suresh · CC BY 2.0 The main building of the New York Public Library, officially the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building since 2008, occupies the stretch of Fifth Avenue between 40th and 42nd Streets in Midtown Manhattan. It was designed by the firm of Carrère and Hastings in the Beaux-Arts manner, clad in white Vermont marble, and opened on 23 May 1911 after more than a decade of work; the cornerstone had been laid in November 1902.
Did you know? The lions were first nicknamed Leo Astor and Leo Lenox; Mayor Fiorello La Guardia renamed them Patience and Fortitude during the Great Depression.
23 Caddo Lake
United States · 32.4 km from Shreveport32.710° N 94.010° W
Shiva Shenoy · CC BY 2.0 There are two competing stories for how Caddo Lake came to exist, and they disagree about almost everything except the outcome. The Caddo people's own account holds that the Great Spirit caused a sudden earthquake to punish a disobedient chief, and the lake appeared more or less overnight, around 1811 — the same period as the real, well-documented New Madrid earthquakes.
Did you know? The world's first over-water oil platform, Ferry Lake No. 1, was completed on Caddo Lake in 1911 by the Gulf Refining Company.
24 Dead Horse Point State Park
United States · 17.7 km from Moab38.506° N 109.733° W
- Dark Sky Place
Image by ducken99 from Pixabay Dead Horse Point is a narrow finger of mesa in southeastern Utah that ends in a sheer drop of about 2,000 feet (610 m) to the Colorado River. From the overlook at its tip the river makes a tight gooseneck loop directly below, a green-edged ribbon of water folded around a tower of red rock, while the canyon country spreads to the horizon in stepped layers of cliffs, benches and buttes.
Did you know? Film crews have used the point since at least Warlock in 1959, followed by Con Air, John Carter and the series Westworld.
How this list is ranked
Places are chosen for how they look, not for how famous they are: each one has its own description and a photograph credited to its author. The order is a single world ranking that weighs the beauty of the place in curated photography together with how widely it is documented — the number of language editions of its encyclopedia article and how often that article is read in a year. The list is rebuilt as places are added, so the order and the counts on this page are always current.
Questions people ask
- What are the most beautiful film locations in the United States?
- On our list, Mount Rushmore ranks first, followed by Hoover Dam and Mount Rainier.
- Which film shows King Kong on the Empire State Building?
- King Kong (1933), in which the giant ape climbs the newly completed skyscraper and fights biplanes from its mast. The scene was repeated in the 1976 and 2005 remakes.
- Was Planet of the Apes filmed at the Statue of Liberty?
- No. The final scene of the 1968 film used a partial replica of the statue built on a beach in Malibu, California.
- What is the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco?
- It is the surviving rotunda and colonnade of the Panama-Pacific International Exposition of 1915, designed by Bernard Maybeck and later rebuilt in permanent materials.
- How many film locations are on this list in the United States?
- The list covers 24 film locations.