Nu Boyana—a 75-acre all-in-one studio complex on the southern edge of Sofia, Bulgaria—has been a favorite of cost-conscious producers for over a decade, and responsible for both some of the best action movies in recent memory and some of the worst. Built under communism, and reinvented as a production hub for genre films and B-movies in the 1990s, Nu Boyana is known for its backlots, large outdoor sets that are maintained year round.
Unless you regularly look up Bulgarian movie studios on Google Street View (or read their press releases), then you probably don’t know that Nu Boyana offers prospective film producers a detailed virtual tour of their facilities, from the Roman quarter, which includes a full-size amphitheater for staging gladiator matches, to the garage where the studio keeps the small fleet of New York taxis and NYPD squad cars needed for its Manhattan set.
You can also tour the prop and costume departments, as well as the armory, or peek around a fake corner of an American suburb before jumping over to the Siberian gulag / concentration camp set. And because Nu Boyana’s Google-powered virtual tour is aimed mostly at other people in the film industry, you can also visit the studio’s workshops and less scenic locales like the lot where they keep trailers and the shed where they keep the plane cockpits, or check out what the nearby woods look like when lit for a horror movie.