Reel fame turns into real magic for locations

A stone bridge in eastern Guangdong province once served a simple purpose: villagers used it to cross from one side to the other. But a movie has changed that.

After it got featured in Dear You, the bridge has become a destination for thousands of people, not because they need to cross it, but because they want to stand where the story unfolded. Similarly, All Wishes Come True! has drawn visitors to Datong in Shanxi, while Once Upon a Time in the Middle East has breathed new life into Ningxia Hui autonomous region's Shitanjing, a once-quiet mining settlement.

Across China, a curious form of tourism is taking shape. People are travelling not only to see beautiful locations but also to see places they already know through cinema.

By the end of August, China's 2026 box office had surpassed 28.2 billion yuan ($4.2 billion), with the summer season alone generating 12.5 billion yuan. But a more revealing measure of cinema's cultural power lies beyond the box office. A successful movie can inspire audiences to explore the real-world locations — streets, bridges, villages or landscapes — that captured their imagination.

One reason for this trend is obvious. In an age of short videos and social media, travel has increasingly become an experience to be shared. Film locations provide a ready-made visual script: stand here, recreate the scene, and post it online.

But the stronger pull is harder to measure. Movies give places a kind of emotional familiarity. Before ever setting foot in a village, a viewer may have seen its streets through a character's eyes, lingered over its landscape, or associated it with moments of love, loss or renewal. The place is real, but it has already entered the imagination.

This is what makes screen tourism different from ordinary sightseeing. Visitors are exploring the gap between the world they saw on screen and the reality before them. For a moment, fiction and reality overlap.

That overlap can be powerful, yet fleeting. A movie can catapult a destination to fame almost overnight. Yet when audiences move on to new stories, so too can the crowds. The risk is that a place becomes merely a backdrop — somewhere to take a photograph, buy a souvenir and then leave.

The real challenge is therefore not how to prolong a movie's popularity, but how to turn a few minutes of screen time into a reason for visitors to stay longer in the place.

Dali, in Yunnan province, is an instructive example. When the television drama Meet Yourself became a hit in 2023, Fengyangyi, a village near Dali, was thrust into the national spotlight. Before the show, Fengyangyi was a quiet village off the tourist trail. After the drama became a hit, visitors began arriving in waves.

But Fengyangyi did not try to cling to its status as a film location. Instead, it used the attention to deepen its own story. The village's Tea Horse Road heritage, Bai ethnic architecture and traditional way of life became integral to the visitor experience. Old courtyards transformed into tea houses, art spaces, cafés and traditional craft workshops, giving new life to spaces that had long stood idle and attracting artists and entrepreneurs to the village. The drama opened the door; the village gave visitors a reason to walk in through it.

Xiamen, in Fujian province, presents another model: not just benefiting from individual productions, but cultivating a durable relationship between filmmaking and tourism.

The city has long been a favorite location for movies and TV dramas. Since 2023, local authorities have developed movie-tourism routes that connect dozens of locations across the city. Tourists need not chase a single hit. They can explore Xiamen itself, seeing its old streets, waterfronts and architecture through the collective memory of many productions.

In this model, the city is not merely a backdrop for stories but a character in its own right. This may be a more sustainable future for screen tourism. The most successful destinations will not be those that wait for the next hit movie to rescue them. They will be those that treat a movie's attention as an invitation to tell visitors everything the camera could not.

A movie can show a village but cannot convey its history to the audience. It can capture a street at golden hour but cannot serve the local cuisine, explain the architecture or recount the stories passed down through generations. While a movie can make a place seem familiar, only the place itself can transform that familiarity into a sense of belonging.

That is why the smartest destinations are not striving to live forever within a movie. They are using the movie to bring people to a story much larger than the screen.

The credits will roll. The cameras will leave. What matters is whether visitors still have a reason to stay.

The author is an associate professor at the Department of Chinese Language and Literature, Xiamen University.

The views don't necessarily reflect those of China Daily.

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