Hilariously Awful Moonfall Latest Movie Set in Colorado but Not Filmed Here

Moonfall, the wannabe blockbuster from director Roland Emmerich, the cinematic auteur of blowing up computer-generated shit (see Independence Day, White House Down, The Day After Tomorrow, etc.), is a box-office bomb for plenty of reasons. The story is ludicrous, the dialogue is worse, the scientific explanations for what's happening would have killed Stephen Hawking if he wasn't already dead, and the actors' biggest accomplishment is making it through the picture without a single eye-roll (Halle Berry deserves another Oscar for that alone).

But Moonfall is worth seeing for its overflowing supply of unintentional humor (it's a movie to laugh at, not with) and, for local viewers, the frequent mentions of Colorado. As the moon begins disintegrating and spewing lunar shrapnel at vulnerable humans (don't ask), most of the major characters on Earth begin heading to the Centennial State for reasons that are never fully explained (NORAD is alluded to but not actually mentioned). If you sneak a flask into the theater and take a slug every time the word "Colorado" is used, you'll be thoroughly blitzed long before the final credits roll.

But despite all of the action that's supposed to be taking place in the Aspen Valley, among other places, not a frame of Moonfall was actually filmed in Colorado. The Internet Movie Database lists its filming locations as Montreal, Canada and Los Angeles.

This is hardly an unusual situation, and was especially common during the glory years of the Hollywood studio system. Among the movies that have Colorado or one of the state's cities in the title but were filmed elsewhere are 1937's Colorado Kid, 1939's Colorado Sunset, 1940's Colorado, 1941's In Old Colorado, 1946's Colorado Serenade, 1948's The Man From Colorado, 1949's The Denver Kid and 1952's Leadville Gunslinger, all of which were made in California, and 1955's The Road to Denver, lensed in Utah.

There have been exceptions, of course: Our 2017 roundup of the best movies partly filmed in Colorado is highlighted by 1939's Stagecoach, 1956's The Searchers, 1967's In Cold Blood, 1969's Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, 1973's Badlands and Sleeper, 1983's WarGames, 1989's Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, 1993's In the Line of Fire and 2002's About Schmidt.

But in the past couple of decades, moviemakers wanting to film on location have tended to gravitate to states that provide subsidies, tax breaks and other financial incentives — among them Georgia and two neighboring states, New Mexico and Utah. As for Colorado, it's never gotten serious about this game. In 2017, for instance, the state's film incentive budget was slashed from a paltry $3 million to just $750,000. At the time, Colorado Film Commissioner Donald Zuckerman admitted, "We won't be able to compete," in part because New Mexico's budget was $50 million.

Last year, the state legislature increased Colorado's film incentive budget to $6 million. That's the highest ever, but since it's a mere fraction of the $130 million to which New Mexico's outlay has risen, movie executives haven't been rushing to take advantage. According to the comprehensive Film in Colorado website, the most recent big Hollywood flicks to film here were The Hateful Eight and Furious 7, both released back in 2015.  The most recent productions touted on a Colorado Office of Economic Development & International Trade page devoted to the subject are Extraction, a small-budget sci-fi effort that spent a couple of weeks on the Western Slope, an unnamed short film about "exploring love in the modern age" that captured some images in Elbert County in August, and Game On! Esports Colorado, a documentary that aired on PBS12 in October.

It's a lot easier to find movies set in the state but portrayed by other places. Here are our picks for the ten most memorable Colorado movies not filmed in Colorado, originally shared in 2020. Most of them are a lot better than Moonfall — which isn't all that hard.
Citizen Kane (1941)
Filming locations: New York, California
Decades-old spoiler alert: “Rosebud,” the last word that millionaire newspaper tycoon Charles Foster Kane (director/co-writer/star Orson Welles) vocalizes before shuffling off this mortal coil, is a sled. But what most people forget is that this plaything symbolizes his early years in Colorado, before gold was found on the family’s property — a discovery that ended an innocence Kane still yearns for long after it’s been shattered.

Harvey (1950)
Filming location: California
The story of Elwood P. Dowd (Jimmy Stewart), a man whose best friend is a human-sized invisible rabbit, comes by its Colorado roots honestly: Mary Chase, who wrote the play of the same name on which the movie is based, graduated from West High School in Denver and later attended both the University of Denver and the University of Colorado Boulder.

The Long, Long Trailer (1953)
Filming location: California
A not terribly successful effort to turn first-couple-of-television Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz into movie draws, The Long, Long Trailer is a road-trip comedy that depicts the pair’s honeymoon nearly crashing during a drive through the mountains of Colorado. Since then, plenty of other films have made fictional treks through this state without crews ever setting foot here.

Support Your Local Sheriff (1969)
Filming location: California
One of the most entertaining movies made by actor James Garner, Support Your Local Sheriff takes place in the town of Calendar, Colorado. Since no such town exists, we’re guessing that the filmmakers simply gave up looking for it after a while and decided to take a shot at reproducing it on a Hollywood back lot.

5 Card Stud (1968)
Filming location: Mexico
Unlike Calendar, Colorado, there actually is a Rincon — but it turns out to be a region of New Mexico, not a town 100 miles from Denver, where 5 Card Stud takes place. The only real-life connection between Colorado and this revenge drama, in which Robert Mitchum and Dean Martin are among the principals in a narrative about lethal retribution for the lynching of a man allegedly caught cheating at poker, is that it played in local theaters.

Jeremiah Johnson (1972)
Filming location: Utah
In one of his best roles, Robert Redford plays a Colorado mountain man who commemorated his victories over Native Americans bent on wiping him out by slaying them and eating their livers. Redford famously attended the University of Colorado Boulder, but he fell in love with Utah, which served as a setting stand-in. At least it wasn’t California.

Red Dawn (1984)
Filming location: New Mexico
The Internet Movie Database description of Red Dawn’s plot begins: “From out of the sky, Soviet, Nicaraguan and Cuban troops begin landing on the football field of a Colorado high school.” But the plucky group of teens who battled these ferociously stereotypical enemies, portrayed by the likes of Patrick Swayze, Charlie Sheen, Jennifer Gray and C. Thomas Howell, aided by Powers Boothe and Harry Dean Stanton, didn’t get any closer to Colorado than New Mexico, a state that continues to attract more than its share of movie-production revenue.

Battlefield Earth (2000)
Filming location: California, Canada
This Scientology super-session, with believer John Travolta starring in an adaptation of sect founder L. Ron Hubbard’s best-known novel, focuses on the Psychlos, a cadre of aliens that rule the Earth circa the year 3000. But you’ll be glad to know that Denver survives in this dystopian future, albeit under less than ideal circumstances: It’s the Psychlos’s central base and the location of a giant slave camp.

Day of the Dead (2008)
Filming location: Bulgaria
As anyone who’s ever been there knows, Leadville is an extremely picturesque place — and it would have looked great in this quasi-remake of director George Romero’s 1985 zombie-fest of the same name. But apparently Bulgaria was cheaper.

BlacKkKlansman (2018)
Filming location: New York
If ever a film should have been made in Colorado, it was this one. After all, Ron Stallworth, on whose autobiographical book the screenplay is based, served as a police officer in Colorado Springs, where he managed to fool the Ku Klux Klan into making him a member even though he's Black. But no: Director/co-writer Spike Lee is a proud resident of the greater New York City area, and he didn’t venture much farther than Ossining, a community on the Hudson River. Which sucKkKs.