A bit of entertainment news with a travel angle has been doing the rounds this week: actor Joseph Zada — the star cast in the upcoming Hunger Games prequel — has reportedly backed a fan petition calling for the franchise's next chapter to come to London. Whatever the studios decide, the story lands in a city that already knows exactly what to do with film fame.
London has quietly become one of Europe's great screen-tourism capitals. Harry Potter alone draws hundreds of thousands of visitors a year to the Warner Bros. Studio Tour in Leavesden, while the Paddington films have turned Primrose Hill and Portobello Road into pilgrimage stops. Add in the James Bond landmarks scattered across the City and Westminster, Notting Hill's perpetually photogenic bookshop, and the Bridgerton effect pulling visitors to Georgian terraces in places like Bath and Greenwich, and you get a tourism economy that leans heavily on the screen.
The appeal of a franchise like The Hunger Games shooting in the capital is easy to understand. London offers an unusual mix: period architecture that can stand in for almost any era, brutalist concrete for dystopian sets, and world-class studio facilities just outside town at Pinewood and Shepperton. Prequels and blockbusters have been quietly using British locations as stand-ins for everywhere from Washington DC to fantasy realms for decades — often without audiences realising they're looking at British soil.
For travellers, the fun part is that film-spotting in London doesn't require a tour bus or a ticket. Much of the city's screen heritage is free and woven into ordinary neighbourhoods: a market street in Notting Hill, a riverside stretch in Southwark, a crooked alley off Leadenhall Market in the City. When a new production lands, location scouts tend to favour the same walkable pockets, so visitors who know where previous crews set up often get a head start on the next wave of famous corners.
Whether or not a petition moves the needle with a studio, it's a reminder of how strongly audiences now connect the stories they love with the places they can visit. Screen tourism is worth billions to the UK economy annually, and destinations have caught on — film offices, walking tours and themed afternoon teas appear within months of any big release. For holidaymakers planning a London trip, it's worth checking what's filming before you go: the city regularly hosts major productions in plain sight, and stumbling across a set on a side street is one of the better free experiences the capital offers.
If the prequel does come to London, expect the usual pattern: locations kept secret until release, then a scramble of tours and guides within weeks. In the meantime, the city's existing film map is more than enough to fill a long weekend — and unlike most movie merchandise, it's all walkable.
Story via Secret London.
