Glass Key, Florida was utilized as a key location in 2024's Road House from Amazon Prime Video, leaving viewers questioning if the area is real.
Is Road House's Glass Key, Florida Real?
Jake Gyllenhaal's Road House, which debuted on Amazon Prime Video on March 21, is set in Glass Key, a Florida area.
Promotional material for the 2024 reboot placed the core location for the story on a "nondescript Key, south of Marathon," as did story details from the film itself. In the real world, Marathon is located about 50 miles northeast of Key West, the bottom-most point off the southern Florida coast.
Glass Key is first brought up in Road House when Jake Gyllenhaal's Elwood Dalton goes there after he's recruited to be the head bouncer of a rowdy roadhouse in the Florida Keys community.
In the movie, the roadhouse (called "The Roadhouse") is located "just up the highway, past mile marker 77," as noted by Kevin Carroll's bookstore owner Stephen.
Looking at any real-world map of Florida and the surrounding keys, fans can see no location in or around the state called Glass Key. This fictional city was developed specifically for Road House, as with many other movies that have taken place in made-up cities, towns, or even countries.
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Where Did Road House Film for Glass Key, Florida?
As noted by dominican.news, almost all of Road House was shot in the Dominican Republic, starting in October 2022. Production company Lantica Media worked hard to build the sets for this new movie, employing many locals.
Lantica Media CEO Albert Martínez (via Instagram) shared how the company's productions injected over $200 million into the Dominican economy in 2022, expressing his joy to see Road House filming there:
"Very happy to be able to show President Luis Abinader the 'Road House' set that is currently filming in our country."
Although filming did not happen in Florida, Road House director Doug Liman touched on wanting the area to feel authentic in the film's official production notes (per Decider).
He wanted to embrace the idea of a bar that did not have doors and having scenes "flow from inside to outside" rather than the set giving the vibe of being set on a soundstage:
"I didn’t want the bar to feel like it was on a soundstage. Visiting the Keys, a lot of the bars don’t even have doors necessarily; they’re open to the outside. I really wanted to embrace that, 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. The sets that Greg and his art department created for this movie were so beautiful."
Production designer Greg Berry spoke in those same notes about wanting "something that was rooted in time" and that had been in the Keys for a while, hoping to get something that felt like it was from the 1950s or 1960s on screen:
"If I were to put a label on it, the design itself would be described as mid-century modern, Tiki Polynesian. It was an amalgam of many conversations with Doug, who wanted something that was rooted in time, something that had been in the Keys for 50-some-odd years and felt like it had a sense of place. So we were thinking that this bar was built, maybe, late ’50s, early ’60s, and took that approach in the design of it."
Gyllenhaal even heaped heavy praise onto the set for the bar built for Road House, saying it was "so well-crafted" that he felt "it should have become a real bar when [they] were finished with it."
Additional filming took place in Las Vegas, Nevada, with Gyllenhaal shooting a weigh-in scene at the MGM Grand Garden Arena during the UFC 285 event in March 2023.
Gyllenhaal and the crew also had half an hour during the event itself to film material that was used for Elwood Dalton's early career in MMA.
Road House is now streaming on Amazon Prime Video.
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