Is Vancouver a Good Proxy For Gotham?

The Vancouver Art Gallery has been transformed into a Gotham City set piece ahead of filming for a new Batwoman television pilot. As a Vancouver resident, I normally get excited when they announce anything being filmed here, as the film industry provides thousands of jobs for the local economy, both directly and indirectly. Millions of dollars from outside the country gets injected into several layers of our economy, so all Vancouverites have a stake in our thriving movie business.

But learning that Gotham City was coming to town did not elicit the same enthusiastic response that I've felt upon hearing about other projects. It has nothing to do with Batwoman being the protagonist, as we support diversity in the cinematic universe and had no objection to Supergirl on any level. The problem is; Vancouver is widely considered to be one of the most beautiful cities in the world, where Gotham is supposed to be a dark, gothic, dystopian location. They are going to require an incredible special effects team to turn this place into what they need it to become.

The other problem is, they film 3 other shows in Vancouver that are all from the same DC universe but based in different imaginary cities. The number of set locations that even remotely resemble Gotham will be limited, and most of those will have already been used in other programs. Fans might start to ask why Gotham looks so much like Central City...if they haven't already started asking why National City looks so much like Central City. There are cost savings reasons why the studio would choose to shoot all three in the same place, even though they are all supposed to occur in different cities.

Perhaps what they'll need to do for Batwoman is to write the script under the pretext that she doesn't often travel to downtown and instead does most of her crime fighting in the suburbs. There's a reason that Chicago is considered to be such a great filming location for Gotham based programming. It has the right type of older architecture and metropolitan density to act as the background for the home of the dark knight. In Vancouver, they'll need to film all the downtown Gotham scenes within a few blocks of Georgia street, unless their special effects team has a solution for this problem.

In the end, this feels like a studio cost savings decision that will ultimately have a negative impact on the type of visual imagery they need to portray. I wish Batwoman the best of luck, and I hope the first lesbian super hero enjoys success. My objection to this project is entirely about where they have chosen to shoot it, not the proposed characters or the sexual orientations of anyone involved. Vancouver is simply too beautiful to play Gotham.