Armageddon Filming Locations

The saving grace of Michael Bay’s gung-ho epic, as an asteroid the size of Texas threatens total oblivion, is the ragtag line-up of quirky characters whose price tag for saving the world is never to pay taxes again – ever. The Space Shuttle launch is for real, filmed at the Kennedy Space Center, east of Orlando, in Florida (seen, naturally, in Apollo 13).

Filming also took place at NASA’s six million-gallon neutral buoyancy tank at the Johnson Space Center, Houston, Texas.

It's a global threat – so establishing reaction shots were taken in New York, Washington DC and at Pilot Point, Aubrey and Denton, Texas.

The surface of the asteroid, where the shuttles Independence and Freedom crash-land, was in the Badlands National Park, South Dakota.

Director Bay also used Edwards Air Force Base, north of LA; the Shrine Auditorium, 665 West Jefferson Boulevard (seen in the original 1933 King Kong); the Very Large Array National Radio Astronomy Observatory near Magdalena in New Mexico (seen in the Jodie Foster sci-fi epic Contact) and the Fletcher Oil Refinery, 24721 Main Street, Carson between Sepulveda and Lomita Boulevard.

The lively nightclub, from which Rockhound (Steve Buscemi) and Oscar Choi (Owen Wilson) get ejected after celebrating their last night on earth, is the lobby of the wildly elaborate Los Angeles Theatre, 615 South Broadway, downtown Los Angeles (a very popular location, seen Chaplin and Charlie's Angels among many other films). Harry Stamper (Bruce Willis) visits his ageing dad (Lawrence Tierney) to say goodbye at the RR Blacker House,1177 Hillcrest Avenue, Oak Knoll, Pasadena.(which was previously used as the interior of Doc Emmett”s house in Back to the Future) – though you need to watch the restored Director’s Cut on DVD to catch this scene.

Armageddon location: the meteor shower on Grand Central Station, New York...

More global atmosphere shots were filmed in San Michele, France; the Blue Mosque and Ortakoy, Istanbul, Turkey; at the Taj Mahal and the Red Fort, India and in Shanghai, China.

The opening meteor shower blitzing ‘53rd Street, New York’ was actually filmed in downtown Los Angeles, around Fourth Street and Main Street, by the old Barclay Hotel (a locale often standing in for New York, in films as diverse as As Good As It Gets and Godzilla).

Armageddon location: ...which lands on Fourth and Main Street, downtown LA

The church where Grace Stamper (Liv Tyler) and AJ Frost (Ben Affleck) get hitched at the end of the movie is St Brendan’s, 310 South Van Ness Avenue at Third Street, Hancock Park, midtown LA, which may (or may not) be a nod to classic 50s scifi War of the Worlds, which also filmed at the church.

Armageddon location: the wedding, St brendan's, South Van Ness