Sure they shot a Tom Cruise’s Jack Reacher here recently. Yeah, Viggo Mortensen was wandering around our wood shooting The Road a few years back. The Dark Knight Rises…yeah, we know.
But a futuristic, CGI-laden, sci-fi tale about survival on a dangerous alien planet…shot in Pennsylvania, AYKM? No.
When former Philadelphia natives Will Smith and M. Night Shyamalan—the star and director, respectively, of Columbia Pictures’ After Earth—needed a top-of-the-line sound stage, they didn’t go to London or Hollywood, they went home, to south Philly’s Sun Center Studios.
The story involves a general (Smith) returning from duty, traveling with his estranged son (Jayden Smith) when their spaceship is damaged and breaks up over a planet “where everything has evolved to kill humans.” Earth.
With the general badly injured, it falls to the young man to overcome his fear and recover a homing beacon so they can be rescued.
The bulk of the interior scenes involving the spaceship were shot at Sun Center. Moving the 100-foot-long, 18,000-pound ship was child’s play for the studio’s 90,000-pound hydraulic gimbal.
Special effects foreman Joey DiGaetano said having access to such facilities outside of Hollywood “does not happen very often.”
Sun Center Senior VP Adam Rotwitt was, of course delighted.
“Notwithstanding the many other and undeniably exotic locations where filming took place, the Sun Center Studios management team was pleased that the production chose to work at our new facility and shoot most of their stage work here,” he said.
“We could not be more proud to have hosted such a major motion picture with two of our hometown heroes who also happen to be two of the world’s biggest box-office stars.”
After Earth opens nationwide May 31.