Qingdao Film Studio: 40 Sound Stages, No Tours

This is a guide to the Qingdao film studio complex at Oriental Movie Metropolis — the largest purpose-built production facility in China, what it has shot, what the numbers mean, and which parts of it you can actually walk into. The answer to that last question is shorter than any travel page will tell you.

Forty sound stages. No ticket to any of them.

There is a building in Qingdao with a floor big enough to hold a football pitch, a clear height of 12.5 metres, a floor rated at three tonnes per square metre, and walls insulated to NR25 so that a whisper on one side is inaudible on the other. The Wandering Earth was shot in it. So was Creation of the Gods. So was most of what Chinese cinema has spent the last eight years pretending is not computer-generated.

You cannot go in. Not because it is secret, and not because it is dangerous, but because it is a factory, and factories do not sell tickets to the room where the work happens.

This page is about the Qingdao film studio complex — officially Qingdao Oriental Movie Metropolis — Dōngfāng Yǐngdū, the Oriental Film Capital — which is the largest purpose-built film production complex in China and one of the largest in the world. It is 376 hectares. The studio is 170 of them. The other 206 hectares are a shopping mall, an amusement park, a water park, four hotels, a marina, a theatre and an island of apartments.

That ratio is the whole article. Because when you search for this place in English, you get hotels. Not reviews of a studio tour, not a ticket page, not a map of the backlot — hotels. Three of the seven search suggestions for “oriental movie metropolis” are literally hotel names: the Crowne Plaza, the Wanda Vista, the Elong. That is not an accident of search. It is an accurate description of what the place is for, most of the time, for most of the people who go there.

The rest of this page is the difference between those two paragraphs, in detail — including the numbers, the films, the one time they opened the gates, and the ticket price that everyone quotes and nobody checks.

What “Oriental Movie Metropolis” actually covers

The name is used for at least three different things, and the confusion starts there.

Name you will see	What it is	Size	Can you enter?
Oriental Movie Metropolis Film Industrial Park 东方影都影视产业园	The production facility: 40 sound stages, 32 workshops, underwater stage, virtual production, post-production	170 ha	Only on a booked tour, and only into unoccupied stages
Oriental Movie Metropolis 东方影都	The whole development, including everything below	376 ha land 5.4 million m² floor area	—
Sunac Mall 融创茂	Shopping mall with a cinema-themed entertainment zone inside	360,000 m²	Yes, free
Sunac Park / Water World 融创乐园 / 水世界	Indoor amusement park and water park	21,000 m² + 27,000 m²	Yes, ticketed
Star Island 星光岛	Residential island with hotels, a marina and the Coral Shell Bridge	Island; 230 marina berths	Yes, free to walk
Theatre 东方影都大剧院	Concert and show venue, shaped like a seashell	24,000 m², 1,822 seats	Yes, per show
Cangma Mountain location 藏马山外景地	Backlot with period street sets, 35 km inland	500 mu first phase 181,414 m² built	Partly — it is also a forest park

So the studio is 45% of the land and a much smaller share of the floor area. If you have seen a photograph of “Oriental Movie Metropolis” with a beach and a bridge in it, you have seen the 55%, and the 55% has never had a film crew in it.

This is not a criticism. Building a film studio is expensive and slow to pay back; every large studio complex in the world is paired with something that earns money on the days the stages are empty. Pinewood has its conference business. Universal has its theme park. What is unusual here is the scale of the paired thing — 206 hectares of it — and the fact that the paired thing is what the name mostly refers to in practice.

Three doors, one name

Here is the model that makes the rest of this page make sense. Oriental Movie Metropolis has three doors, and they are not the same door.

Door	What is behind it	How you get through	Was anything filmed there?
1. The working door	40 sound stages, 32 scenery workshops, the 8,833 m² underwater centre, the virtual production stage, the Dolby Atmos mixing theatre	You are a production. Or you are not going in.	Yes — this is the film
2. The tour door	Bookable film-tour products, special-effects workshops, a foley and prosthetic-makeup experience, the film museum, the Operation Leviathan set now run as a defence-education base	Booking, and a guide	Yes, but not the stages you came for
3. The commercial door	Mall, amusement park, water world, Star Island, Coral Shell Bridge, theatre, four hotels	Free, or a normal attraction ticket	No. Never.

Almost every misunderstanding about this place is a person standing at door 3 holding a ticket for door 3 and believing they are at door 1. That is not a stupid mistake. The branding is deliberately continuous: the same logo, the same road, the same metro stop names, and a hotel lobby that looks like a film set because it was designed to.

The 40 stages, and why the numbers can be trusted

Official figures for the Qingdao film studio, from the park’s own site:

Stage size	How many	Typical use
10,000 m²	1	The big one. Full-size city blocks, large vehicles, crowd work
6,000 m²	2	Large interior sets, spacecraft, halls
5,000 m²	4	Multi-room builds, partial exteriors
3,000 m²	11	The workhorse size
2,000 m²	7	Interiors, standing sets
1,500 m²	10	Smaller interiors, inserts, commercials
1,000 m²	5	Smallest standard stage
Total	40	109,000 m² of stage floor

Two things about that table are worth checking, because they are the kind of check almost nobody does.

First, the counts add up: 1 + 2 + 4 + 11 + 7 + 10 + 5 = 40. The park says it has 40 stages, and the size breakdown also says 40. That is a small thing but it is not nothing — a marketing number and an engineering list are usually allowed to drift apart, and here they have not.

Second, and better: if you multiply the sizes by the counts you get 109,000 m², and the park separately states its total stage floor as about 109,000 m². Two independent statements, one derived, one stated, agreeing to the square metre. In a subject where “Asia’s largest” gets attached to four different complexes, that is the closest thing to a signature of authenticity you are going to get from a website.

The rest of the facility: 32 scenery workshops totalling about 47,000 m², about 180,000 m² of temporary backlot, a 20,000 m² digital post-production building, and the 8,833 m² underwater centre. The whole thing carries Pinewood design certification — a British studio-services company audited the design against its own standards, which is a narrower claim than “Pinewood built it” and a more useful one than “international standard”.

What a sound stage actually is, in numbers

If you have never been inside a stage at a Qingdao film studio, the specifications are the most concrete description available, and they explain why the building cannot be a tourist attraction.

Specification	Value	Why it matters
Clear height under the grid	12.5 m	High enough to hang a two-storey set and still light it from above
Floor load	30 kN/m² (3 tonnes/m²)	You can drive a truck in, or build a concrete staircase
Pit covers	5 kN/m² (500 kg/m²)	Some stages have pits for low angles, cellars, or temporary pools
Acoustic rating	NR25	Sound-proof enough for direct sound recording — no dubbing later
Holding temperature	About 23 °C	Quiet air conditioning that does not ruin the audio take
Smoke clearance	15–30 minutes	Between setups, so a foggy scene does not delay the next one
Lighting capacity	1,600 A per stage, 2,017 A total	Enough to run the lights off the building, no generator truck
Track beams	500 kg per point, 250 kg per metre	For hanging scenery, lamps and wire rigs

Read that list again as a visitor. Every line is a reason you cannot walk through: a floor you could park on, a ceiling you could hang a house from, a pit in the middle, a temperature held steady for the microphone, and a smoke extraction system designed to clear a room in the time it takes to change a lens. None of it is unsafe. All of it is machinery.

The one thing the specs do not tell you is the smell, which is the thing people remember: warm dust, gaffer tape, freshly cut timber, and the particular cold of a stage at six in the morning before the lights come on.

The tank: 21 metres by 10, six deep

Inside the 8,833 m² underwater production centre there are two pools: an indoor heated tank and an outdoor one.

Detail	Value
Indoor tank	About 21 m × 10 m × 6 m deep
Water temperature	Heatable to 32 °C
Filtration	Hair collection, quartz-sand filtration, UV sterilisation
Fittings	Observation windows, floor and wall anchor points, ring-shaped working platform
Outdoor pool	For large water surfaces, hulls, waves, rain and fog in natural light

The number that gets quoted in Chinese coverage is “8,833 square metres”, and the number that gets quoted next to it is “6 metres”, and almost no article says which dimension the 6 belongs to. It is the depth. Six metres of water is a working depth for diving sequences and sinking vehicles; it is also, if you are a person who does not swim, an extremely long way down.

The 32 °C matters more than it sounds. A tank held at body temperature is the difference between an actor who can do eleven takes and an actor who can do three, and it is the kind of engineering decision that shows up on screen as whether a scene exists at all.

Stage 5, where the set is a screen

The park runs a virtual production platform on Stage 5, covering motion capture, facial capture, 3D scanning, real-time virtual camera work, DIT and witness-camera recording. The point of all of it is to let a director see the finished background on set instead of eighteen months later.

This is the part of the facility that has changed most since the park opened. When it was built in 2018, Chinese science-fiction film was still largely a green-screen business: actors in grey rooms, looking at tennis balls, with the world added afterwards. The shift to LED-volume work — where the world is on a wall behind the actors and the camera moves through it — happened during the life of this building, and the building changed with it.

It also explains a detail in the films themselves. The reason The Wandering Earth sequels look different from the first one is not a bigger budget. It is that the second and third were shot with a real-time background the actors could react to, and acting to something is different from acting to nothing.

What was shot here

The Qingdao film studio says it has served more than 400 productions and that those productions have taken more than ¥41 billion at the box office. It does not publish a list, and its project page is currently returning a database error, so the titles below are the ones that can be confirmed from more than one direction.

Film	Year	Director	Why it is on this list
Pacific Rim: Uprising	2018	Steven S. DeKnight	Among the first international productions through the gate
Crazy Alien	2019	Ning Hao	Shot here in the park’s first working year
The Wandering Earth	2019	Frant Gwo	The film that made the park’s reputation
A Writer’s Odyssey	2021	Lu Yang	Heavy stage and virtual production work
Moon Man	2022	Zhang Chiyu	Lunar surface built indoors
Creation of the Gods I	2023	Wuershan	The trilogy was launched here
The Wandering Earth II	2023	Frant Gwo	Virtual production at scale
YOLO	2024	Jia Ling	Not science fiction — a boxing gym, built here
Successor	2024	Yan Fei, Peng Damo	Comedy, which is the park’s quiet majority
Operation Leviathan	2025	Dante Lam	Its set is now open to the public, which is unusual
The Wandering Earth 3	in production	Frant Gwo	Named on the park’s own site

The list is a corrective to an assumption. People hear “China’s biggest studio” and picture science fiction, because science fiction is what needs a stage that large. But the majority of the 400 productions are not science fiction and are not cinema — they are comedies, period dramas, television series, commercials and variety shows, which need a controlled room, a quiet room and a warm room, and do not need a 10,000 m² floor at all.

That is why the park can be simultaneously the most important film facility in the country and a place where, on a Tuesday in March, all forty stages might be empty.

The one time they opened the gates: four days, sixteen months late

This is the fact that best explains the relationship between the two halves of the site.

The Qingdao film studio opened on 28 April 2018. Construction had started on 22 September 2013. It was, from day one, a working facility with productions inside it, and it was not a place the public could visit.

The first time the film industrial park opened to ordinary residents was 25 to 28 August 2019, during the Qingdao International Film and Television Expo. Four days. Sixteen months after opening.

Since then the access has widened but not opened: bookable film-tour products under the names “Qingdao Film Journey” and “Oriental Movie Metropolis Studio Tour”, visits to special-effects workshops, a foley and prosthetic-makeup session, and — since June 2025 — the Operation Leviathan set converted into a defence-themed study base, which the park says has received more than 50,000 visitors.

Notice what that list has in common. Every item is a product. There is no general admission, no self-guided route, no hour when the gate is simply open. Access here is not a right of the ticket-holder; it is a scheduled event with a guide and a group.

That is not unique to China, and it is worth saying so. Warner Bros. Studio Tour London works the same way, and so does the Hobbiton set. The difference is that those places sell you the tour as the main thing, with a shop and a café attached. Here the tour is a small side business of a working factory, which is why it is hard to find, inconsistently priced, and occasionally suspended because a production needed the stage.

The other four studios, and why this one is different

China has more film-studio attractions than any other country, and they fall into three models. The Qingdao film studio is the newest model and the only one that is not really an attraction.

Complex	Model	Can you buy a ticket?	What you walk through
Hengdian 横店影视城	Outdoor standing sets, built from 1996, town-sized	Yes — it is a theme park that also shoots	Palaces, streets, whole dynasties, at 1:1
Wuxi Film Studios 无锡影视基地	CCTV-built sets from the late 1980s	Yes — three separate ticketed parks	Three Kingdoms, Water Margin, Tang city
Xiangshan 象山影视城	Outdoor sets plus stages, from 2005	Yes	Condor Heroes sets, streets, a studio block
Changchun Film Studio 长春电影制片厂	The oldest studio in the country, now a museum	Yes — museum ticket	The old plant, its equipment, its history
Qingdao Oriental Movie Metropolis	Industrial: 40 stages, minimal outdoor sets, a commercial district attached	No — not for the studio	A museum, a repurposed set, and a shopping mall

The pattern is a chronology. Hengdian and Wuxi were built to shoot one production and then opened as parks because the sets were too expensive to strike. Xiangshan repeated the model with stages added. Changchun converted a plant into a museum when the plant stopped being competitive.

Qingdao did something else. It built the industrial core first, at a scale that assumes the sets are built inside a building and struck afterwards, and then attached a commercial district because 206 hectares of the site had to pay for itself. The result is the only one of the five where the filming and the visiting happen in genuinely different places.

That is why this page keeps insisting on the three doors. In Hengdian, the ticket and the set are the same thing — you buy a ticket and you are standing where a scene was shot this morning. Here the ticket and the set are on opposite sides of a fence, and the fence is the point.

What you can actually get inside the Qingdao film studio

Four things inside the Qingdao film studio, in descending order of how much they have to do with the films.

The Operation Leviathan set. Dante Lam’s 2025 action film built a large practical set here, and in June 2025 it was converted into a defence-education study base open to the public. The park says it has received more than 50,000 visitors. This is the only place on the whole site where you can stand inside something that was built for a film and is still standing. It is also, unavoidably, now a museum of a different kind — the set has been re-dressed to teach, not to shoot.

The film-tour products. Sold under “Qingdao Film Journey” and “Oriental Movie Metropolis Studio Tour”, these are guided, group-based and irregular. What you see depends on what is empty. On a good day you walk through a 5,000 m² stage with the lights on and a guide explaining the grid. On a bad day the tour is cancelled because a production needed the stage, which is the correct priority and also the reason you should not build a trip around it.

The special-effects workshops. The park names two effects houses inside the complex — Mona Zhonghe and Xinamofu — and offers sessions in foley and prosthetic makeup. Foley is the sleeper hit of the whole site: a small room full of gravel trays, door frames, coconut shells and old shoes, where the sound of a film is made by people hitting things. It is the one part of film production that is genuinely better as a participatory demo than as a spectacle.

The film museum. The Qingdao Film Museum sits in the commercial district and covers the city’s history as a film location, which is longer than most people expect — Qingdao has been used as a stand-in for European and American cities since the 1930s, because of the German-era architecture. If you want one hour that explains why this industry is here at all, this is it.

The 148-yuan ticket that is not for this place

Search for “Qingdao film studio tickets” or “Oriental Movie Metropolis tickets” in Chinese and you will find prices. Search in English and you will find almost nothing, which is itself informative: the English-language demand for this place is not about tickets at all.

The Chinese prices that circulate:

Price you will see	What it actually buys	Verdict
“80 yuan, open 9:00–17:00”	No traceable source. Appears in AI-generated answer sites and undated reposts	Do not use
118 / 138 / 148 / 199 / 218 yuan	Sunac Park ride tickets — an 8-ride pass, adult, concession, pair, parent-and-child	Real, but it is the amusement park
Free	Sunac Mall, Star Island, Coral Shell Bridge, the seafront walk	Correct — and nothing was filmed there

So the most-quoted number for “Oriental Movie Metropolis” is the price of a ride wristband for a indoor roller coaster in a shopping mall. This is not a scam; the two things share a name, a road and a brand. It is simply the fourth time in this series that a price turned out to be a real price for a different object.

What that means practically: budget zero for the studio, because you cannot buy it, and budget 118–218 yuan per person if you want the park, which is a decent indoor amusement park and has nothing to do with cinema beyond the decor.

Star Island, and the bridge everyone photographs

For the city itself — the old town, the piers, the hills — see our Qingdao filming locations guide, which covers the other half of why crews come here. The free part of this site is genuinely good, and it is worth being clear about why, because “free and not a film location” is not the same as “not worth going”.

Star Island is a residential island at the southern end, connected by road, holding hotels, a marina with 230 berths, a seafront promenade, and the Coral Shell Bridge — a pedestrian bridge whose arch is a lattice of white steel that reads, at night, as a lit shell. It is the single most photographed object in the entire development, and it appears in more “Oriental Movie Metropolis” social posts than any stage ever will.

The theatre — 24,000 m², 1,822 seats, shaped like a seashell, officially described as “blue sea and silver shell” — is next to it, and is a real venue with a real programme rather than a decorative building.

The walk from the mall to the bridge to the theatre takes about forty minutes at an unhurried pace, is flat, and is at its best in the hour before sunset when the light comes off the water and the bridge lights come on while the sky is still blue.

The 360,000 m² of it that is a shopping centre

Sunac Mall is 360,000 m². Inside it: the 21,000 m² indoor park with a German-town zone and a “Laoshan wonders” zone, the 27,000 m² water world with 17 water rides, a cinema, and the film museum.

The interior of the park is worth one paragraph of description because it is the clearest possible illustration of door 3. The ceiling is painted as a night sky with clouds. In the middle stands a fibreglass figure several storeys high, lit from below, wreathed in theatrical fog, with families queuing at a railing to photograph it. It is a good piece of themed design and it is entirely fake — not fake as in dishonest, fake as in built, painted, and lit to look like something it is not.

Which is exactly what a sound stage is, too. The difference is that on a stage the fakeness is in service of a camera, and here it is in service of a queue.

Cangma Mountain: the backlot that is 35 km inland

The one part of the Qingdao film studio operation that is a real, walkable film set is not in the city’s urban area at all.

Detail	Value
Distance from the studio	About 35 km
First phase land	About 500 mu (33 ha)
Total built area	About 180,000 m²
Investment	About ¥3 billion
European and Republican-era Beiping streets (AB)	68,142 m²
Republican-era Shanghai and shikumen lanes (CD)	74,282 m²
Period costume zone (EF)	38,990 m²
Sum of the three zones	181,414 m²

Add the three zones and you get 181,414 m², against a stated total of “about 180,000 m²”. That is the same kind of internal consistency as the stage table, and it means the three zone figures are a real breakdown rather than three numbers chosen for a brochure.

Seen from the air, Cangma Mountain is a cluster of red-roofed European buildings in a green valley, with a lake, roads and terraced slopes around it — a backlot that reads as a resort because that is what it also is.

There is a forest park, a visitor centre and a ticket office with signs in Chinese, English and Korean.

Getting there, and the metro station that changed its name

To reach the Qingdao film studio by rail, take Qingdao Metro Line 13, which runs along the west coast and opened on 26 December 2018. It is the line that serves this whole development, and the station names are where foreign visitors get lost.

Station	What it serves	Note
Zhaojiamiao (Film Industrial Park) 赵家庙（影视产业园）	The studio’s own gate	Listed in the 2018 plan as “Oriental Movie Metropolis station”; the platform signage photographed in September 2025 reads Zhaojiamiao
Xintun (Lingshan Bay) 辛屯（灵山湾）	Lingshan Bay, the coastal strip	Listed in 2018 as “Lingshan Bay station”
Chaoyangshan 朝阳山	The mall, the park, Star Island — the commercial district	The station every local guide actually tells you to use

So the metro map has a station whose name is the film park, and that is not the station you want if you are going to the mall, the bridge or the hotels. The one you want is Chaoyangshan, at the northern end, which connects directly into the mall complex.

This is a small thing that costs people an hour.

If your destination is “Oriental Movie Metropolis” and you tap the station with that name in it, you will arrive at a fence.

If you are arriving by rail rather than air, the China train guide explains the booking side.

Buses K1, K2, L1, L9 and Huangdao 303 also serve the area, and there is a bus stop called Oriental Movie Metropolis. The car parks at the mall are large and, outside holidays, empty.

The airport that no longer exists

Qingdao’s airport changed on 12 August 2021. On that day Qingdao Jiaodong International Airport (TAO) opened and Liuting International Airport closed, permanently, the same day.

A very large amount of English-language content about Qingdao still routes people to Liuting. It is not a question of being out of date by a year; the airport is gone, the site is being redeveloped, and a taxi driver asked to go there will take you to a building site.

Jiaodong is about 40 km north-west of the city and further still from the west coast. The practical consequence for this page: if you land at TAO and go straight to Oriental Movie Metropolis, you are crossing the entire city. The metro route involves Line 8 into the city and then Line 1 and Line 13, or a taxi of roughly an hour and a half depending on traffic. Coming here on arrival day is possible and unpleasant; coming here on departure day is a good way to miss a flight.

Five things English pages get wrong about this place

Collected because they recur, and because each one costs a reader something real.

1. The airport. A large share of English-language Qingdao content still says Liuting International Airport. It closed on 12 August 2021 and was replaced the same day by Jiaodong (TAO). Anyone following those pages is planning a trip to a construction site.

2. The ticket price. “80 yuan, open 9:00 to 17:00” appears on several answer sites with no source. It is not the studio’s price, the studio has no price, and the opening hours belong to something else. The real paid ticket is 118–218 yuan and it is for the amusement park.

3. “You can tour the studios.” Half true, and the half that is false is the half that matters. There is no general admission, no self-guided route, and no guarantee that a tour will run on your dates. A tour is a scheduled product, not a facility.

4. “The biggest studio in the world.” The claim is repeated without a definition. On stage count, floor area, site area and largest single stage, four different complexes can each be called the biggest. This page gives the numbers and skips the title.

5. “Qingdao West Coast”. Search that phrase in English and nine of the ten suggestions are about a football club — Qingdao West Coast FC, with results, fixtures and predictions. The district and the team share a name, and the team wins the search.

When to go

Period	What it is like	Verdict
May–June	Dry, 18–25 °C, sea fog possible, long evenings	Best overall
September–October	Clearest skies of the year, sea still warm, crowds gone	Best for photographs
July–August	Hot, humid, and the Qingdao beer festival fills the west coast	Fun, but book everything
Late December–February	Cold, windy, sea fog replaced by sea wind; the plaza in front of the gate is empty and grey	Only if you are here anyway
Lunar New Year week	The busiest seven days of the year at the mall and the park	Avoid if you want the free parts quiet

For the wider seasonal picture, see the best time to visit China. One specific timing note: the outdoor pool at the underwater centre and the outdoor sets at Cangma Mountain are weather-dependent, and both are more restricted in winter than the website suggests. If either is the reason for your trip, ask before you go.

How long it takes

If you have	Do this
2 hours	Film museum, then the walk from the mall to the Coral Shell Bridge. No studio, no park.
Half a day	Add the park or the water world, and eat in the mall. This is the realistic visit for most people.
A full day	Book a film-tour product in the morning if one is running, then the museum, the bridge at sunset, dinner on Star Island.
Two days	Day one as above. Day two: Cangma Mountain (35 km, half a day with transport), or the coast at Jinshatan.

If you are building a longer trip, our how many days in China planner puts this in context. What is not on this table: a studio tour that fills a day. There is no such product. The building is a factory, and factories are quick to walk through and closed to visitors.

What a day here costs

Item	Cost	Notes
Studio admission	Not available	No general ticket exists
Film-tour product	Varies; no published price list	Book through the park or a local operator; confirm the price in writing
Film museum	Low, ticketed	The best value on the site
Sunac Park	118–218 yuan per person	Ride pass; prices move with season and channel
Water world	Ticketed, one-price policy	Separate from the park
Star Island, bridge, seafront	Free	—
Metro from the city centre	A few yuan, one hour plus	Line 1 then Line 13, or Line 13 from the west side
Taxi from the city centre	Substantial	Roughly an hour; the bridge toll and distance both count
Cangma Mountain	Forest-park ticket plus transport	35 km each way; a car is the sane option

The honest summary: the free part is free and the paid part is not the thing you came for. A couple can spend a pleasant afternoon here for the price of two metro tickets and a coffee, or spend 400 yuan on ride passes and see a painted ceiling. Both are legitimate. Only one of them is about film.

Four more things on this coast

Jinshatan (Golden Sand Beach). The west coast’s main beach, wide, flat and busy in summer. The beer festival’s main venue is here, which tells you what the area is for in August.

Jiaozhou Bay Bridge. At one point the longest sea bridge in the world, 42 km including approaches, and still the most dramatic piece of infrastructure in the region. You cross it if you drive from the old city to the west coast the northern way; the view from the middle, with nothing but water on both sides, is the best free sight in Qingdao.

Tangdao Bay. The other waterfront, closer to the older part of Huangdao, with a wetland park and a much more local feel than the mall.

Langyatai. Further south down the coast, a headland with a Qin-dynasty terrace where the First Emperor is said to have stood looking for the immortals. It is 80 km away and it is the opposite of everything on this page: old, quiet, unlit, and free of branding.

Signs, names and the two characters you need

The site is more English-friendly than most Chinese attractions, because it was built for an international industry and has hosted foreign crews. The metro has English. The mall has English. The film museum has English labels.

What does not have English is the thing you most need to read: the tour booking pages, the studio’s own site, and the notice at the gate saying which areas are closed today.

Characters	Pinyin	Meaning	Where you will see it
影视产业园	yǐngshì chǎnyè yuán	film and television industrial park	The metro station, the gate, the official site
摄影棚	shèyǐng péng	sound stage	Everywhere on the site plan, never on a ticket
外景地	wàijǐng dì	backlot / exterior location	Cangma Mountain signage
参观	cānguān	visit / tour (as a visitor)	What to search for when you want in
暂不开放	zàn bù kāifàng	temporarily closed	The sentence you will actually meet

If this is your first trip, first time in China covers the practical layer this page assumes. One naming note that saves confusion: in Chinese the place is almost always called 东方影都 (Oriental Film Capital) for the whole development and 影视产业园 (film industrial park) for the studio. If you ask for 东方影都 you will be sent to the mall. If you ask for 影视产业园 you will be sent to the fence. Both answers are correct.

Where to stay, and why the search results are all hotels

Four hotels sit on the Qingdao film studio site: Wanda Vista, Wanda Reign, Crowne Plaza and DoubleTree by Hilton, with about 1,280 rooms and nearly 7,000 m² of meeting space between them. They exist because productions need to house crews for months, and because the development needed a reason for the residential island to be worth building.

This is the answer to the search-suggestion puzzle at the top of the page. When you type “oriental movie metropolis” into Google, the completions are Crowne Plaza, Wanda Vista and Elong — because the people who go there are going to sleep, attend a conference, or use it as a base for the coast. The film industry is the reason the hotels exist; the hotels are the reason most people arrive.

What photographs well, and what does not

Six things, in order of how well they survive a phone camera. If you want to see where these places sit against the rest of the country, the drama map plots every location we have covered.

The Coral Shell Bridge at dusk. Best in the twenty minutes after sunset when the sky is still blue and the bridge lights are on. From the Star Island side, low, looking along the arch.

The theatre exterior. A seashell form in white, best in flat light, worst at midday when the highlights blow out. Shoot it from the west in late afternoon.

The gate plaza. The entrance building with its sign and the big paved forecourt is genuinely photogenic and, out of season, completely empty — which is the photograph that best explains this place.

Cangma Mountain from above. If you have a drone and the permissions, the valley with its red roofs is the single most striking image in the whole complex. On the ground it is a resort street.

The metro station sign. Not a joke. The platform sign reading “Zhaojiamiao (Film Industrial Park)” is the most useful photograph on this page for anyone trying to explain to a taxi driver where they want to go.

Not the sound stages. There is no vantage point from which the stages photograph as anything. They are large grey boxes with roller doors, seen from a road, behind a fence. The drama of a stage is entirely interior and entirely unavailable.

Who this is for, and who should skip it

Come if you are interested in how the Qingdao film studio actually makes Chinese blockbusters, and you accept that the answer is a museum, a repurposed set and a guided walk through whatever happens to be empty. Come if you have children and want an indoor park and a beach in the same afternoon. Come if you are already on the west coast for the beer festival or Jinshatan.

Skip it if you are hoping for a Universal or Warner Bros. experience. There is no tram through the backlot, no costume photo on a real set, no gift shop full of props. The comparable product does not exist here, and the closest thing — a group tour of an empty stage — is a different and much smaller pleasure.

Skip it too if your Qingdao trip is three days and you have not yet seen the old town. The German concession, the piers, the hills and the food streets are the reason Qingdao is a destination; this is an industrial estate with a nice bridge attached, an hour away.

What this page does not know

Eight things, stated plainly, because a page that claims to know everything about a working facility is lying about at least one of them.

1. Whether the August 2019 opening really was the first. The four-day window comes from an encyclopaedia entry, not from an official announcement we could retrieve. The park’s own site does not mention it.
2. What the film-tour products cost today. There is no published price list. Third-party sellers quote figures that do not reconcile with each other.
3. Whether the Operation Leviathan base is still operating, and on what schedule. It opened in June 2025; we have no confirmation of its status this month.
4. Whether the amusement park and water world are fully open. Ownership and operation of the commercial district have changed hands more than once, and attraction closures in China are often announced on site rather than online.
5. Who operates the development now. It was built by Wanda, sold to Sunac in 2017, and the commercial assets have moved again since. We could not obtain a document that settles the current position, so this page describes the site and not the company.
6. The exact distance from Cangma Mountain to the studio. The official site says about 35 km; other sources say 40 km. We use 35 and flag the discrepancy.
7. Which stages a tour can enter. No public list exists. It depends on the shooting schedule, which is the correct way for it to work and a frustrating way to plan.
8. The walking distance from Zhaojiamiao station to the studio gate. Not measured. The station is named for the park, which is not the same as being next to it.

How this was checked

The figures in this page come from three layers, and the layer is stated wherever it matters.

Primary — the film park’s own website: stage counts, stage sizes, total stage area, workshop area, underwater tank dimensions, water temperature, load ratings, clear height, acoustic rating, Cangma Mountain zones, opening date, cumulative production and box-office totals. These are the operator’s own claims about its own facility and should be read as such, but they are internally consistent in two places where consistency is hard to fake.

Secondary — the overall development figures: 376 hectares, 5.4 million m² of floor area, the mall, the parks, the hotels, the theatre, the marina. These come from an encyclopaedia entry and are used only where they do not contradict the operator.

Tertiary — transport and current conditions: metro line and station names, the airport change, ticket ranges. Station names were checked against platform signage photographed in 2025, which is how the rename was caught.

The full set of figures behind this and every other page is in the filming locations dataset. Not used: AI-generated answer pages, undated reposts, and any figure that appeared in only one place and could not be derived from another. The “80 yuan, 9:00–17:00” claim failed all three tests and is reported above only as an example of the failure.

Questions people actually ask

Can you visit the studios where The Wandering Earth was filmed? Not the stages themselves. You can visit the site, the film museum, and — if a tour is running and a stage is empty — one stage, which will not be the one you are thinking of.

Is Oriental Movie Metropolis worth visiting? As a resort with a film museum, yes, if you are on the west coast anyway. As a studio tour, no, because there is no studio tour in the sense you mean.

How much is the ticket? There is no ticket to the studio. The 148 yuan you keep seeing is the amusement park.

How do I get there? Metro Line 13 to Chaoyangshan for the mall and Star Island; the station named for the film park serves the film park, which is a fence.

How long do I need? Two hours for the free parts, half a day if you add the park, a full day if a tour is running.

Is it the biggest studio in the world? It is one of the largest, and the claim depends entirely on whether you count floor area, stage count, site area, or the size of the biggest single stage. This page gives the numbers rather than the title.

Can I see the set from Creation of the Gods? No. Sets are struck. The one set that survives as an attraction is from Operation Leviathan, and it has been re-dressed.

Is it good for children? The commercial district is excellent for children. The studio is not for children at all.

Do I need to book? For the free parts, no. For a tour, yes, and you should confirm it is running the week you go.

Your next move

If you are going for the films: book nothing yet. Email or call the park, ask whether a tour product is running on your dates, and ask which stage it enters. If the answer is vague, plan around the film museum and the Operation Leviathan base instead, and treat anything else as a bonus.

If you are going for the coast: take Line 13 to Chaoyangshan, walk the mall to the bridge, stay for sunset, eat on Star Island, and skip the ticketed attractions unless the weather turns.

If you are going because a search result told you there was a film studio you could walk around: there is not, and this page exists so that you find that out before the taxi, not after.