Where Was Jake Gyllenhaal’s Road House Filmed? Every Major Location, Explained

Of all the legacy sequels and remakes to spring up in the age where IP is king, the “Road House” remake was one of the most underwhelming. Jake Gyllenhaal was really the only reason to watch the anemic remake of “Road House,” which arrived on Amazon’s Prime Video service back in March 21, 2024 following its South by Southwest premiere earlier in the month. The film left much to be desired, adding yet another facet to the argument against Hollywood’s obsession with regurgitating and repackaging existing material.

In comparison to the original, the “Road House” remake took a lot of creative liberties that separate it from the 1989 film, and not necessarily in a good way. For starters, the story plays out in the Florida Keys rather than Missouri. And instead of Patrick Swayze’s New York City bouncer, Gyllenhaal plays a UFC fighter who’s lured to the titular bar by owner Frankie (Jessica Williams), who offers him an escape from his life of scamming fighters and contemplating ending his own life. Of course, this is “Road House,” so the central premise of a bouncer fending off all manner of undesirables remains in place, with Gyllenhaal’s Elwood Dalton stoking the ire of the local motorcycle gang once he takes up the position of head bouncer at The Road House.

Switching the location to the Florida keys makes for the most obvious visual difference between this and Swayze’s action classic. But it turns out very little of this movie was actually shot in the Sunshine State. In fact, very little of it was shot in the United States, as our look at the filming locations for “Road House” will reveal.

In “Road House,” Elwood Dalton moves to the fictional town of Glass Key, an area in the Florida Keys that’s supposed to be located close to Marathon, Florida. This change of location dictates much of the story in director Doug Liman’s remake, which features as its central antagonist Ben Brandt (Billy Magnussen), a crime boss intent upon forcing Frankie to sell her bar so he can build a luxury resort on that land. The local motorcycle gang is in league with Brandt, who is chiefly responsible for flooding the Keys with drugs and overseeing the illicit drug empire he inherited from his father; it perhaps goes without saying that the “Road House” remake is much darker than the original. Still, the Florida Keys as a location is central to the plot of “Road House” 2024.

Which is why it’s interesting to note that almost none of the film was actually shot in Florida. In fact, when filming got underway on August 23, 2022, it did so in an entirely different country. The Dominican Republic stood in for Glass Key, with the Caribbean country providing a similar landscape to that of South Florida but with the kind of tax breaks that Amazon MGM was evidently looking for. From August to November of 2023, “Road House” filmed in the country, using cities such as Santo Domingo and Punta Cana as stand-ins for the Florida Keys setting. Scenes in Charlie (Hannah Lanier) and Stephen (Kevin Carroll)’s bookstore, on the beach, and at the Road House bar itself were all shot in the D.R., making it the main location for the movie. As Florida Keys film commissioner Chad Newman told KeysNews, “99% of the movie is filmed in the D.R.”

As Stephen notes in the film, The Road House bar is located “just up the highway, past mile marker 77.” That refers to a real Florida location, but there’s certainly no bar there in real life. For the film, the bar was designed by production designer Greg Berry and built from scratch on a Dominican Republic beach in Guayacanes, San Pedro de Macorís.

Despite the whole thing being fabricated, director Doug Liman wanted the bar to feel as realistic as possible. (He took this same approach to the brawls in “Road House,” using pillow fights to make the punches look real.) The director revealed in the film’s production notes (via Decider) that he’d visited several bars in the Florida Keys and strove to recreate certain design elements in his set, such as a lack of doors. “I really wanted to embrace that,” the director said, “and one way to do it was to build the bar for real in a spot that’s directly between a highway and the ocean. It was the most ideal way to shoot this movie because the scenes can flow from inside to outside.”

Production designer Greg Berry described his approach to The Road House design as “mid-century modern, Tiki Polynesian.” Whatever Berry and the crew did, they certainly built the fictional bar well as it managed to survive Hurricane Fiona, which swept through the Dominican Republic in September 2022 during the second month of filming. While on a tour of recovery efforts, President Luis Abinader even stopped by the set to take a quick look at the sturdy construction, which, according to dr1, had been built by Dominican craftsmen.

“Road House” isn’t going to go down in cinematic history as one of the best movies set in Florida, and part of that might well be down to the fact that hardly any of the film was actually shot there. While the entirety of “Road House” takes place in the Florida Keys (barring Elwood Dalton’s fight against Jax “Jetway” Harris in Las Vegas, which we’ll get to momentarily), only a handful of shots were actually captured in the Sunshine State. Most obvious is the Seven Mile Bridge, which is depicted in an aerial shot close to the start of the film. This Florida Keys bridge connects Knight’s Key (part of Marathon, Florida, the closest town to the fictional Glass Key) to Little Duck Key in the Lower Keys. The bridge appears after Dalton boards a Greyhound bus bound for Glass Key, and is shown only briefly.

As noted by KeysNews, the “Road House” crew also captured a shot of Fred the Tree, a lone Casuarina tree located on the old Seven Mile Bridge which has attained celebrity status among Florida locals. Unfortunately, not all those locals took kindly to the characterization of the Florida Keys in “Road House,” with KeysNews noting that there were “many liberties taken that were outright inaccurate or unflattering to the Keys.” Among them were “rampant drug problems” and a “Monroe County sheriff, nicknamed ‘Big Dick'” who was depicted as “being ‘on the take,'” which I suppose is a fair complaint from people who don’t want to see their community tarnished on screen.

Aside from those establishing shots, the only other scenes to be shot in the United States were Elwood Dalton’s weigh-in and fight against Jax “Jetway” Harris (played by former UFC fighter Jay Hieron). This flashback scene required Jake Gyllenhaal and the “Road House” crew to travel to Las Vegas in March 202​​​​​​3 before shooting the fight during the UFC 285 event at T-Mobile Arena in Paradise, Nevada.

After filming a fake weigh-in at the UFC 285 weigh-ins in Sin City, Gyllenhaal and the crew shot the big fight flashback. The scene required Elwood Dalton to walk out and face off against Harris, but it seems actually filming the necessary scenes during the big UFC event was never guaranteed. As UFC president Dana White, who appears briefly in the movie, told Novastream (via The Independent), there were apparently “five alternate plans” for filming this big flashback, depending on how the timing worked out on the day.

Still, according to Business Insider, things went off without a hitch, and even the commentators appeared “stunned” by the brutality of Gyllenhaal’s fake fight. Lamentably, “Road House” is unlikely to be remembered as one of Gyllenhaal’s best movies, but you can’t say the man didn’t get into shape for the role, with even White commenting on his physique following the Vegas shoot, saying, “I don’t think he’s been USADA tested, but he looks great.”