watching wonderwoman as a washingtonian: what ww84 gets right (and wrong) about d.c. written by hannah docter-loeb MOVIES ALWAYS GET WASHINGTON D.C. WRONG. I remember watching Marvel’s Captain America: Winter Soldier, a movie supposedly based in the District. The opening shots are filmed at the Lincoln Memorial, the fight scene at the Theodore Roosevelt Bridge seems legit, and the police cars resemble the Metropolitan Police Department of the District of Columbia, but the streets give it away. Almost all of the filming, aside from a few shots here and there, was done in Cleveland. This isn’t unusual for movies and T.V. shows. Certain “postcard” shots are taken in D.C., but much of the rest is filmed elsewhere, occasionally
recognizable by the tall skyscrapers that would violate the Height Act if they were actually in the city. Much of Netflix’s House of Cards is filmed 40 minutes away, in Baltimore. Aaron Sorkin’s West Wing was shot on sound stages in California, with a tiny bit of D.C. footage sprinkled in. Other than a couple of scenes in the actual Smithsonian and at the Lincoln Memorial, Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian was filmed in Canada. Even the 2017 historical political thriller The Post was not filmed in its namesake city. So why don’t many films and series actually film in D.C.? A quick Google search gave me some answers. A lot of it has to do with the city’s
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