After decades spent wrestling with the logistics of international shoots, Hollywood seems to be coming full circle. It's like the early days of cinema again, when exotic locales were evoked within the confines of a movie studio, though today's filmmakers aren't so reliant on hand-painted scenery any more.
Earlier this year, "Captain America: Civil War" staged its most spectacular set piece at a German airport that was actually a perfect digital replica. The parts of the scene that weren't computer-generated had been filmed on a studio backlot in Atlanta.
Now there's Jon Favreau's "The Jungle Book," a lavish rehash of the 1967 Disney classic that takes computer-generated fakery to new heights. Perhaps the biggest surprise of the film comes at the very end, when a line in the credits reveals that it was shot in downtown Los Angeles. It may be teeming with hyperreal flora and fauna, but Mowgli — the jungle-dwelling "man cub" played by 12-year-old newcomer Neel Sethi — is the only part of it that wasn't born in a hard drive.