15 of the Best Movies Ever Made in Upstate NY – And the Reasons Why!

Lights, Camera, Upstate New York! Are we living in Hollywood East?

What do A Quiet Place, The Irishman, Salt, The Amazing Spider-Man 2, The Horse Whisperer, Slap Shot, The Other Guys, The Place Beyond the Pines, and Ironweed all have in common?

You guessed it, all these major movies - or parts of them - were filmed in Upstate New York.

Upstate turned into "mini-Hollywood" over the last few years as more and more major film companies have come to New York to shoot their movies.  Sometimes agencies will choose an area or region that makes the most sense for the movie, other times they'll come here because it's cheaper.

Regardless of the reason, it's always exciting to see Hollywood's biggest stars set up shop in our hometown, and eat, drink, play, socialize, and work in our area.

And over the years, Upstate New York has been very fortunate to have major talents like Al Pacino, Robert Redford, Jack Nicholson, Meryl Streep, Angelina Jolie, Bradley Cooper, Jim Carrey, Mark Walhberg, Tobey Maguire, Dustin Hoffman, John Krasinski, Eva Mendes and more, have been seen perusing the streets of the Capital Region.

How did we come up with the ranking system?

The easy part was gathering as much info as we could about the films made in Upstate New York, but then, we needed a grading system so that we could rank them from #15, all the way down to #1.

We judged and graded each film based on 5 different sets of criteria, equally weighted. They are as follows:

• Star Power: How big of a star the actor(s) were.
• Average Critics Score: Rotten Tomatoes, IMDB, Metacritic, etc
• Box Office Success: How much $$$$ the movie made.
• Time Spent in Upstate New York:  Did they come here to shoot one scene, or did they set up shop for months?  The longer they were in town, the higher the grade was given to the film.
• Overall Wow Factor/ Overall Impact: Do people still talk about it to this day?

Here are the top 15 movies (ranked) made in Upstate New York, with 2 additional films worthy of a shoutout.

If we missed a bunch, or if you disagree with our ranking, feel free to let us know.