This record is incomplete and partly wrong
It was compiled from published lists that disagree with each other. Some entries are duplicates, some dates conflict with the films they name, and hundreds of cast and crew are not yet recorded. If you worked on any of these, or you know what we have wrong, tell us. Corrections are credited.
The count, under three rules
Film Tucson's decade pages carry an explicit caveat: “We have listed a few of the many locations under each production.” Their lists are partial by design. A production absent from them may still have shot at Old Tucson. So there is no single true number — there is a number per counting rule, and here are ours.
| Rule | Titles | Counting episodes | What it means |
|---|
| A · Strict | 168 | 331 | Film Tucson explicitly names Old Tucson among the locations. The defensible floor. |
| B · Inclusive | 286 | 449 | Any credible source associates the production with Old Tucson. Partial location lists are treated as partial, not as denials. This is the number we use. |
| C · Everything | 288 | 451 | Adds records that only ever name Mescal. Included for completeness, not claimed. |
Five titles are widely credited to Old Tucson but do not name it in Film Tucson's listing — Tombstone (1993), Bonanza (1966), The Sacketts (1979), The Young Pioneers (1976) and Buffalo Soldiers (1997). They are tagged Old Tucson not listed by Film Tucson and counted. That tag is a research note, not a verdict.
Worth knowing anyway: Mescal's operators state that 60% of Tombstone was shot at their set. Both things can be true — a production can use two sites forty miles apart, and most of these did.
On the number
Published counts of what was shot here range from 200 to over 500. They cannot all be right, and none of them publishes a counting rule. Here is every figure we have found, with its source and date.
| Figure | Source | Date | What it appears to count |
|---|
| over 200 | Paul J. Lawton, Old Tucson Studios (Arcadia) | 2008 | Movies and television shows |
| nearly 300 | Arizona Daily Star / tucson.com | 2022 | Productions since 1939 |
| nearly 400 | Robert Shelton, former owner, to the Associated Press | Apr 1995 | Movies, television shows and commercials |
| more than 400 | Arizona Daily Wildcat | 2020 | Film and television projects over 75 years |
| 442 | IMDb titles listing “Old Tucson — 201 S. Kinney Road” as a filming location, counted by BLARE Films | 2019 | Anything IMDb has catalogued |
| 450 | Visit Tucson listing | c. 2024 | Movies and television shows |
| over 500 | oldtucson.com, current operator | 2026 | Films and television shows |
| more than 500 | Cronkite News / AZ Big Media | 2022 | Movies filmed here “at least in part” |
Why the spread is 300 wide. Four choices move the number, and no published figure states which were made: whether a television series counts once or once per episode; whether commercials, industrials, music videos and student films count; whether video games count; and whether productions shot at Mescal — the sister set built in 1968 near Benson, on 60 acres leased from the Arizona State Land Department, sold to the Kartchner family in 2021 and never part of the 2022 operating agreement — are folded in. Mescal's own operators claim between 120 and 150 productions. Sixty percent of Tombstone was shot there, not here.
Where the higher numbers come from: episodes. IMDb tags individual television episodes with their own filming locations. The High Chaparral episode “Destination Tucson” carries Old Tucson at 201 S. Kinney Road on its own title page, separately from the series entry. Count a title once and The High Chaparral is one record; count episodes and it is 98. Two series alone — The High Chaparral at 98 and The Young Riders at 68 — move the count from 288 to 451. Eighteen more series on this list are still unlogged.
Site attribution. 176 records now carry Film Tucson's own location data, which separates Old Tucson from Mescal: 168 explicitly name Old Tucson, 30 name Mescal, many name both. All five Film Tucson decade pages — 1920–1959, 1960–1979, 1980–1999, 2000–2019 and 2020–present — have now been harvested.
Film Tucson also does episode-level attribution where it can. Its Gunsmoke entry specifies season 18, episode 11 — not the series. That is the standard the rest of this record has to reach.
Our position. We count by Rule B: 286 titles, 449 with episodes. Each title counts once by default, with the episode-level figure shown alongside. It includes feature films, television productions and games, and excludes commercials and industrials. The honest sentence is that between 400 and 500 productions have shot here at least in part, the higher figures are counting episodes, and no one has yet published a rule. We are doing that work in public.
Confidence, marked per episode. Four tiers, and the difference between them is the whole point.
- confirmed An independent source places that specific episode at Old Tucson.
- series-level The series is documented as filming here, but this episode is unverified. The High Chaparral: creator David Dortort said roughly 70% was shot on location, mostly at Old Tucson, with cast and crew there about 18 weeks a year.
- Old Tucson or Mescal The series used both sites and no one has separated them. The Young Riders shot at Old Tucson and at Mescal, the latter serving as a saguaro-free stand-in for the Great Plains. All 67 Arizona episodes sit in this tier. This is the honest state of the record, and it is why counts differ.
- not Old Tucson Actively excluded. The Young Riders pilot was shot at Columbia State Historic Park in California before production moved to Arizona. Anyone counting all 68 episodes as Old Tucson is wrong by at least one — and that is the smallest error in this field.