Public Square stands in for a Stuttgart beer garden in this scene from "The Avengers" filmed in Cleveland in August of 2011.Pictured are stunt double actors playing Captain America and Loki.The DVD of "Marvel's The Avengers" has finally been released, meaning people from Cleveland and Northeast Ohio will be spending hours looking for themselves in crowd scenes and identifying familiar buildings and locations from the movie that was shot in the area last summer.
We're here to help.
What follows is a list that will tell you at what time in the movie local scenes were shot in Northeast Ohio, from the NASA Plum Brook facility in Sandusky to Public Square downtown.
Much of the film is computer-generated images cut and pasted with real footage from Cleveland and elsewhere for a seamless sequence. So a particular scene may be part-Cleveland and part-New York.
Now that the studio announced "Captain America: Winter Soldier" will also be shot in Cleveland, we get to do it all again.
Readers are invited to play along at cleveland.com/avengers and share in the comments section locales we missed in our accounting. We didn't expect to find them all, especially a one-second flash of a downtown building in the background of a Hulk-Loki smackdown, so we're looking for people with eyesight as sharp as Hawkeye's.
The following is what we spotted, with the time of the movie at the listing.
• 2 minutes, 29 seconds: Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) and Maria Hill (Cobie Smulders) walk down a circular staircase at SHIELD headquarters, which is the NASA facility at Plum Brook in Sandusky.
• 3:46: Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner) confers with Fury about the teleportation device, the Cosmic Cube, that is activating itself in the NASA facility. Note the NASA banner hanging next to a SHIELD banner in the background.
• 4:43: A good view of Plum Brook's huge, dome-shaped testing lab for the sudden appearance of the evil Norse god Loki and his first battles with humans.
• 3:46 though 10:00: Loki (Tom Hiddleston) arrives, steals Hawkeye's will, and goes a little crazy. Much was shot at Plum Brook.
• 11:48: A Norfolk & Southern freight train pulls into the station just outside the unused warehouse on Ashland Avenue and Cedar Road.
• 11:57 through 15:18: Cut to the interior of an old warehouse where the Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) is being interrogated while tied to a chair. This is inside the old warehouse at Ashland and Cedar. To commemorate the neighborhood's role in the movie, an Avengers mural is now painted on the wall at Biggie's Foods at East 55th Street and Cedar.
• 19:25 through 20:30: Nick Fury talks via video screens with mysterious authorities, shot at Plum Brook.
• 29:20 through 29:50: Soldiers run through underground tunnels into a laboratory, shot in the viaduct under the Detroit-Superior (Veterans Memorial) Bridge.
• 31:29: Loki in the viaduct.
• 36:06 through 36:40: More in the underground lab, shot in the Detroit-Superior viaduct.
• 37:20: Loki outside the entrance to Tower City on Public Square.
• 37:23: A large exterior shot of the opera house in Stuttgart, Germany, which is the transformed Tower City entrance.
•37:30 through 37:47: The interior of the opera house where Loki interrupts a formal reception, filmed inside the old Lakeside Courthouse on St. Clair Avenue.
• 38:22: Loki stands in front of an oval mural in the courthouse, and steals an eyeball from a screaming man. The crowd then flees in terror from the courthouse and Loki . . .
• 39:28 though 42:44: . . . magically exits onto Public Square, where he attempts to subjugate the crowd of opera-lovers until being defeated by Captain America (Chris Evans) and Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr.). Many downtown buildings are in the background, including what is now the Horseshoe Casino, the former BP Building at 200 Public Square and the Old Stone Church.
• 39:58: A great shot of Loki standing in front of Terminal Tower.
Now it really gets tough. The climactic battle scene that lasts 30 minutes was shot along East Ninth Street and in New York City, and starts at 1 hour, 42 minutes into the movie. The director cuts back and forth so quickly it's tough to pick out Cleveland scenes. We see numerous vacant buildings on East Ninth Street between Euclid and Prospect avenues that were repurposed for the film with fake fronts, new paint jobs and windows. The former Ameritrust Building at East Ninth and Euclid is prominent, as is the Medical Mutual Building on the west side of East Ninth.
• 1 hour: 44 minutes: People flee down East Ninth from aliens and debris caused by the fight between Loki and Thor (Chris Hemsworth). Moments later, faux New York police cars turn onto East Ninth Street from Euclid Avenue.
• 1:45: Captain America, Hawkeye and the Black Widow jump out of a SHIELD aircraft onto Walnut Avenue near East Ninth Street.
• 1:46: The three superheroes stand among crashed cars on East Ninth and stare up at a giant, flying, snake-like attacker.
• 1:47: The Avenging trio duck behind a cab parked on East Ninth. The scenes with Banner (Mark Ruffalo as the Hulk) in them were shot in New York. Street scenes with Captain America, Thor, Black Widow and Hawkeye were probably shot on East Ninth.
• 1:52: Part of the big snake thing crushes a cab, shot at Walnut near East Ninth.
• 1:53: Captain America turns to the Hulk and simply says, "Smash." This could have been any city, but it is a favorite moment.
• 1:57: The Army arrives, through a garage entrance on East Ninth, next to the old Ameritrust Building (named Grand Central 42nd Street Station in the movie).
• 1:58: The aliens fight Captain America and innocent extras inside the old Ameritrust Building. The scene ends with Captain America being blown out of a window and landing on a cab on East Ninth.
• 2:04: Captain America and Thor battle the aliens in front of the Medical Mutual building.