The next Star Wars movie will be filmed at Pinewood Studios in London. Star Wars: The Force Awakens recently wrapped its Pinewood shoot as the first in a new trilogy and will be released in 2015. Gareth Edwards will direct the next film, a standalone movie, at Pinewood next year.
International producers on a familiarisation trip to Abu Dhabi have highlighted the need for studio facilities alongside the city’s 30% filming incentive. The city’s main production company, twofour54 intaj, offers 11 sound stages, the largest of which are around 7,000 sq ft.
New Zealand has marked 100 days to the Cricket World Cup by staging a short game on Auckland Harbour Bridge. Australia and New Zealand are joint hosts of the competition in February and March next year, and players from both countries filmed the Auckland spot.
Victorian crime series Ripper Street returned to shoot its third season on location in Dublin, using the Irish capital as a stand-in for London. Filming locations included Clancy Barracks, Trinity College, Dublin Castle and Kilmainham Gaol, and the new series will be launched on 14 November.
A new film set in the secretive world of unmanned military drone strikes has finished filming in South Africa, doubling the country for locations around the world. Helen Mirren co-stars in Eye in the Sky, which follows a drone mission to monitor a terror cell in Nairobi.
A movie adaptation of the popular young adult novel Paper Towns has started filming on location in Charlotte, North Carolina. The state is currently best known for hosting several high-profile TV dramas including Under the Dome based on a story by horror writer Stephen King.
Tom Cruise has filmed an aerial stunt for Mission: Impossible 5 at an RAF base in East Anglia in the UK. The action franchise is now well known for daring physical stunt work, with Cruise scaling Dubai’s Burj Khalifa for Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol in 2011.
Supernatural TV series Grimm is filming its fourth season in the show’s established home in Portland, Oregon. The production team was attracted partly by Portland’s forest locations that are appropriate for the story’s fairy tale origins, and also by Oregon’s filming incentives.