Ryan Reynolds’s character spends a lot of time in Russia in his new action comedy, Mayday, which began streaming on Apple TV today.
Written and directed by Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley—the duo behind Game Night and the recent Dungeons and Dragons movie—Mayday stars Reynolds as a patriotic, capitalist U.S. Navy pilot named Troy, who crash lands behind enemy lines in Soviet Russia in 1987, during the Gorbachev years of the Cold War.
Troy finds himself injured and trapped in the remote home of Russian carpenter, Nikolai Ustinov (Kenneth Branagh, doing a very fun, very silly Russian accent). Nikolai—or, Nick, as he insists Troy call him—idolizes American capitalism. His favorite movie is Top Gun. He dreams of someday eating McDonalds. And his ultimate dream? To live in the U.S. Troy strikes up a deal: If Nick helps him get out of Russia, he’ll pull some strings and get Nick legal passage to the U.S.
But just because most of Mayday takes place in Russia doesn’t mean that Reynolds and Branagh actually spent time in a country that is currently under a Level 4 travel advisory, “do not travel,” according the U.S. Department of State. Read on to learn more about the Mayday 2026 movie filming locations.
Where was the 2026 Mayday movie filmed?
Although the movie takes place in Russia, Mayday was actually shot in Montreal, Canada and the surrounding area, for the most part. Some sequences were shot in Budapest, Hungary.
For the scene near the beginning of the movie where Troy goes out drinking with his Navy buddy in San Diego, the production team created a replica of the San Diegoe Gaslamp Quarter in Montreal. The exterior scenes where Troy and Nick traversing through the Russian wilderness were also shot in Canada.
Some of the interiors, like Nick’s cabin and Anna’s apartment, were filmed on a sound stages, on sets. In an interview for the Mayday production notes, production designer Nora Takacs Ekberg—who grew up in Hungary during the Soviet era—worked hard to make the Canadian sets and locations feel authentically Russian, and authentically 1980s.
“We wanted textures and buildings that actually looked like that era,” Takacs Ekberg said. “We brought in researchers specializing in 1980s Moscow and sourced materials from all over Eastern Europe. We scouted close to 500 locations and selected 10 of them. We also built sets when we couldn’t find the right place. For example, a scene in Anna’s apartment building had to play out on two floors, so we built a two-story set that allowed us to do that.”
The big climactic action sequence in Moscow, in which Troy and Nick hijack a tank carrying a nuclear bomb, was shot in Budapest, in one of the city’s major squares, Heroes’ Square. For Mayday, Heroes’ Square transformed into Moscow’s Red Square, filled with a crowd for the annual May Day parade. According to the Mayday production notes, that sequence involved over one thousand extras, and a lot of military vehicles.
“It was absolutely insane for the actors and everybody involved,” said cinematographer Barry Peterson, in an interview for the Mayday production notes. “We could pan the camera in any direction and see something real. I was shooting people who were really responding to a 100-foot missile launcher driving by.”
Other filming locations in Hungary, according to Film Feed, include the city of Dunaujvaros, on Vasmű Road and the Lower Danube promenade, which served as a location for the military tank car chase sequence. The production also filmed in Salgotarjan, Hungary, around Rakoczi Road, Pecskő Road, Marcius 15 Street, Erzsebet Square and Fő Square.
Finally, the aerial footage was a combination of VFX and real aerial background footage, which was shot on a southern France.
“When we started designing the aerial sequences we set a high bar for realism,” VFX supervisor James E. Price said in an interview for the Mayday production notes. “We couldn’t have the actors actually flying jets, but the next best thing was having real backgrounds and real lighting. Our solution was to shoot aerial backgrounds and then project them on an LED volume stage.”
The production crew built a simulated FA/1 plane, as well as a simulated Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird, with room for a camera in the cockpit to captures those background shots. Building those were not easy—especially when it came to the secretive Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird.
“The military is still quite secretive about it,” production designer Nora Takacs Ekberg explained in the same interview. “We were able to look at a few of them but it was hard to get proper information. We brought in a gentleman who flew these planes for 30 years and even he couldn’t tell us everything he knew.”
But Aviation effects supervisor Doug Scroggins was determined to make it happen, according to executive producer John G. Scott in the production notes interview. “We were able to get an actual SR-17 canopy and nosecone, so some of it’s real and the rest is movie magic. But a camera-ready cockpit for the SR-71 had to be built from scratch. No one’s ever done that before.”