Many people who saw real-world footage of the Francis Scott Key Bridge’s March 26 collapse likened the scene to a disaster movie.
But an online claim we saw circulating on social media went one step further.
“For those of you that don’t know,” a March 27 Facebook post said, “The Francis Scott Key bridge is the same bridge that was shown in the Netflix movie ‘Leave the World Behind.’ The production company is owned by the Obamas. Open your eyes people.”
The post included an image of a person sitting on the edge of what looks like a hospital bed, staring out across the water at the bridge crash in Baltimore. Similar posts were shared on X.
The Facebook post were flagged as part of Meta’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram.)
The 2023 apocalyptic Netflix hit film “Leave the World Behind,” starred Julia Roberts, Ethan Hawke and Mahershala Ali. It was based on a 2020 novel of the same name and produced by Higher Ground, a media company co-founded by former first lady Michelle Obama and former President Barack Obama.
The film does not feature the Francis Scott Key Bridge. And the image in the post is not from the movie; we found a version of it on a stock image site. The original stock image shows a cityscape view out of the window, not the collapsed Key Bridge.
“Leave the World Behind” was filmed largely on location at a house on Long Island, New York. “The house at the center of ‘Leave the World Behind’ is a real location; exterior shots and some interiors were filmed in Old Westbury, New York,” Netflix said in Tudum, its behind-the-scenes online magazine.
Newsday, a news outlet covering Long Island, reported about the movie’s crew filming in several locations in the area in April 2022.
PolitiFact reviewed scenes from the film and found no match for the Baltimore bridge.
“Leave the World Behind” has some scenes with bridges, including one in which a long pile of self-driving Teslas crash. Atlas on Wonders, a website that uses crowdsourced information to identify film locations, identified that bridge as the Jones Bay Bridge in Long Island, New York.
The bridge in another scene showing New York City in ruins appears to be a computer-generated image of the George Washington Bridge, which connects New York and New Jersey. In another scene, a ship runs ashore, forcing beachgoers to run to safety. The ship did not crash into a bridge.
Officials and investigators probing the Baltimore bridge collapse have called it an accident and say there is no evidence that the bridge was targeted.
We rate the claim that the Key bridge is the same bridge that was shown in “Leave the World Behind” False.
RELATED: No, the movie “Leave the World Behind” didn’t predict the Baltimore bridge collapse
