Johnny Mnemonic | 1995

Set in the ‘New Jersey’ and ‘Beijing’ of 2021, Johnny Mnemonic was filmed in Toronto and Montréal.

The ‘Beijing’ hotel is in Toronto’s southwestern suburb of Mississauga.

In Toronto itself, Udo Kier’s ‘New Jersey’ nightclub is The Opera House, 735 Queen Street East.

Built in 1909 as a Vaudeville theatre in historic Riverside, one of the many working class communities that grew during the late 1800s to service the growing city of Toronto, the Opera House operated as La Plaza Theatre during the 1930s, subsequently becoming a movie theatre through to the1960s, when it was known variously as the Acropolis, Dundas and Cinema Ellas. It's now a live music venue.

The church of priest Dolph Lundgren (yes, you read that right, Dolph is a priest) is Riverdale Presbyterian Church, 662 Pape Avenue at Harcourt Avenue, in East York.

One surprising location is the makeshift hospital of doctor Spider (Henry Rollins), which is the classical Great Hall of Toronto's Union Station, Front Street West. Opened in 1927, the largest and busiest railway station in Canada, is spectacular enough to have stood stood in for Chicago's Union Station in Arthur Hiller's 1976 comedy thriller Silver Streak, with Gene Wilder and Richard Pryor.

Johnny's recovered childhood memories were filmed in Casa Loma, 1 Austin Terrace at Spadina Road, and on the staircase of nearby Spadina House, 285 Spadina Road.

Casa Loma, the turn-of-the-century mock-medieval folly overlooking northern Toronto, also provided the interior of Professor Xavier's academy in Bryan Singer's original X-Men, as well as being featured in Edgar Wright’s Scott Pilgrim Vs The World, David Cronenberg’s Dead Ringers and 1996 Jean-Claude van Damme actioner Maximum Risk

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