Iceland Filming Locations You Can Actually Visit

If you saw The Odyssey this summer and thought the underworld looked oddly familiar, you were not imagining things. Odysseus walks into Hades on a black sand beach about two hours east of Reykjavík, and you can drive to it.

2026 has turned into one of those years where Iceland keeps showing up on the big screen. Not the biggest year we have ever had, as you will see further down, but a busy one. Here is what has been filmed here, where the locations actually are, and what it is worth seeing for yourself.

The Odyssey (July 2026)

Christopher Nolan brought roughly 1,000 people to Iceland for a 12-day shoot in June 2025, including around 450 Icelandic extras. Matt Damon, Zendaya and Elliot Page were all here.

Iceland plays the underworld. Nolan has said he wanted the Icelandic landscape for Hades from early on, the idea being that the further north and colder Odysseus travels, the further he is from home. Shooting in June means it was filmed in perpetual daylight, which is a strange way to make a realm of the dead and probably why it looks the way it does.

Reported locations: the black sands and caves at Hjörleifshöfði on the South Coast, the Snæfellsnes peninsula, the Markarfljót area, and Landeyjahöfn harbor, where the production moored the Viking longship Draken Harald Hårfagre, standing in for Odysseus’s ship. One of the most dramatic scenes is when about 450 Icelanders in the guise of dead warriors chased Matt Damon and his crew members across a black-sand beach. The filming in Iceland was not easy. During filming, the lovely Zendaya reported that she was so cold in Iceland that she could not say her lines. I know the feeling! The Icelandic weather further afflicted the project when a storm wreaked havoc with the crew’s base at Vík. Just another Tuesday in Iceland!

The film has surpassed $ 900 million at the box office in about a fortnight, making it one of the year’s highest-grossing releases. A lot of people are seeing those landscapes right now.

Supergirl (June 2026)

Milly Alcock’s Kara Zor-El spends the film out among alien worlds, and several of those worlds are South Iceland. The production came here in May 2025 at the end of a five-month shoot that was otherwise based at Warner Bros. Studios Leavesden in England, with additional work in the Scottish Highlands.

Black sand deserts, lava fields, geothermal ground and glacier country did the job that computer graphics would normally do. Jason Momoa is in it as Lobo, in case you need another reason.

Masters of the Universe (June 2026)

Travis Knight’s He-Man reboot for Amazon MGM was filmed mostly in England, with mountain work in the Italian Dolomites. Iceland supplied the harsher end of Eternia, the volcanic country. Reports point to the Reynisfjara area and other volcanic sites.

Greenland 2: Migration (January 2026)

Gerard Butler and Morena Baccarin’s family crosses a frozen, wrecked Europe. The film is set in Greenland, Britain and France, but a good deal of it was shot in and around Reykjavík in the summer of 2024, alongside studio work in England.

The Brink of War (August 2026)

This one is ours in a way the others are not. It is about the 1986 Reykjavík Summit between Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev; it is set almost entirely in Iceland, and it was shot entirely in Iceland, including the scenes that are meant to take place abroad.

Jeff Daniels plays Reagan, Jared Harris plays Gorbachev, J.K. Simmons plays Secretary of State George Shultz, and Jóhannes Haukur Jóhannesson is in the cast. Filming took place in October and November 2024, with much of it inside Höfði, the actual house where the summit happened. Other work was done around Reykjavík, Reykjanes and Mosfellsdalur.

It opens internationally in mid-August.

I was thirteen years old when it was announced that the world leaders would meet in Reykjavik. I was extremely excited about it all, just like the rest of the country.

For us Icelanders, it was a surprising change to put ourselves on the world map. I know the foreign media attending the summit were very impressed by how easy it was to arrange everything for them; after all, there were just a handful of hyperactive local guys handling it all. As the case with Icelanders, we are great at improvising quickly. However, we are useless at long-term planning!

One side-story: the record label Smekkleysa (Bad Taste), which found success by publishing The Sugarcubes in the late eighties, got started by creating and selling quirky postcards with a summit theme. This was drawn by Friðrik Erlingsson, then the guitarist for the Sugarcubes. The proceeds of the sale were used to release the Sugarcubes’ first 7″ album. These featured the Icelandic versions of the songs “Birthday” and “Cat”. Although the album was a commercial failure, the Sugarcubes, and their singer Björk, would go on to great things. I would give my right hand for a copy of the postcard! Anyway, many Icelanders tried to use the summit as a launchpad for international fame. These attempts are incredibly cringe, but nothing excited Icelanders more in the eighties than the chance of international fame.

Dune: Part Three (December 2026)

Denis Villeneuve’s final chapter of the Dune trilogy was filmed here in 2025, according to Truenorth, the production service company behind most of the international work that comes to Iceland. The publicly listed locations for the film are Budapest, Abu Dhabi’s Liwa Desert, and Wadi Rum in Jordan, and no Icelandic locations have been detailed yet. I will update this page once the film is out in December and we can see what is what. I am pretty excited about this film; the two preceding Dune films have been a feast for our eyeballs.

Not just films

The opening sequence of the James Bond game 007: First Light is set in Iceland. And the final episode of Stranger Things, which dropped on New Year’s Eve, put Háifoss front and center.

Looking ahead, Truenorth points to The Rings of Power and an unnamed Star Wars series as productions that have shot here. Star Wars is well-trodden ground for us already, between Rogue One, The Force Awakens and The Mandalorian.

Why is Iceland a popular filming location

In a recent news story by RUV, Leifur B. Dagfinnsson, who runs Truenorth, gives three reasons, and they are worth understanding if you want to know why Iceland punches so far above its weight on this.

The landscape, and getting to it. Plenty of countries have dramatic scenery.

Fewer have black desert, green mountains, glaciers and highland moonscape within a few hours of each other, on roads that can take a convoy. Moving 300, 500, or 1,000 people to a remote location is no joke, and in most countries, it simply cannot be done. Here it can.

The crews. Icelandic film crews are considered among the best in the world

That is not national pride talking; it is why the same companies keep coming back.

The rebate

Iceland reimburses 25% or 35% of production costs incurred here. The 35% rate is what makes Iceland competitive for the very big films, and that without it, we would mostly get plate shoots. That means five people flying in for five days to grab landscape footage for a background, rather than five hundred people staying two or three weeks and spending money in hotels, restaurants and on local crews.

Is this the biggest year ever? No.

It is a strong year with two enormous titles, The Odyssey and Dune 3, but Iceland has had bigger. Around 2012, the country hosted four major productions in a single year: Oblivion, Noah, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty and Thor: The Dark World. Star Trek Into Darkness shot partly here in the same period. Most of those landed in cinemas in 2013.

Films and TV shows put Iceland in the spotlight

According to the Icelandic Tourist Board’s border survey, films, television, music videos and other screen content play a part in roughly half of all visitor decisions to come to Iceland. Half. That is not a rounding error, and it is why the rebate discussion is a tourism discussion as much as a film industry one.

What filming locations can you actually go to

The honest version, from someone who drives these roads:

Hjörleifshöfði sits on the black sand flats east of Vík, with views towards Mýrdalsjökull and Katla volcano. The cave there, often called Yoda Cave, is the shot everyone recognizes. It is off the Ring Road on a gravel track. Go carefully, and do not attempt it in a small car in bad weather.

Reynisfjara, just west of Vík, is the black beach with the basalt columns. It is also the most dangerous beach in the country. Sneaker waves have killed people here. Stay well back from the water, watch the sea before you walk anywhere, and never turn your back on it. Nobody needs a photograph that badly.

Landeyjahöfn is the small harbor where the ferry to the Westman Islands leaves from, about three hours from Reykjavík by car if you take your time. There is not much there, which is rather the point.

Snæfellsnes is a comfortable long day trip from Reykjavík, or better as an overnight stay. Lava fields, glacier, and Kirkjufell.

Háifoss is in Þjórsárdalur in the south, on a rough road that wants a proper vehicle. The waterfall drops into a canyon, and the viewpoint is an unfenced cliff edge. Treat it with respect.

Höfði is a ten-minute walk along the shoreline from downtown Reykjavík, on Sæbraut. It is a city property used for official functions, so the interior is generally not open, but the exterior is free to visit, and the seaside setting is the whole story. Stand there for a minute and consider that two men once sat in that small white house and came close to ending the nuclear arms race.

Reporting on Truenorth and the Icelandic film rebate is based on Guðmundur Atli Hlynsson’s interview with Leifur B. Dagfinnsson for RÚV, published 3 August 2026: Ísland í hverri stórmyndinni á fætur annarri. Filming locations are drawn from published production reports and are marked as reported where they have not been officially confirmed.