Birmingham-shot Gunner turns Alabama backdrops into global awards success

Joel Shapiro says Sloss Furnaces gave Gunner a look no soundstage could fake, and the Birmingham-shot thriller has now cleared 40 festival wins from Los Angeles to Bangkok. That number is the easy headline, but the bigger story for Birmingham is how a film shot in the city in 2023 turned its Alabama locations into part of its identity instead of something to hide.

Gunner was filmed throughout Birmingham in late March and into mid-April 2023, with locations that included Sloss Furnaces and The Venues at Watermark Place in Bessemer. The film later reached theaters on August 16, 2024 as a 106-minute American action thriller directed by Dimitri Logothetis and written by Gary Scott Thompson. Morgan Freeman and Luke Hemsworth headline the cast, and Warner Brothers handled North American distribution.

What makes the awards run matter in Alabama circles is not just the volume, but the range. The film’s wins have stacked up across categories tied to feature work, direction, action and screenplay recognition, which suggests the craft package traveled well with festival programmers far from Birmingham. Shapiro has pointed to Sloss Furnaces as the kind of industrial backdrop that would be extraordinarily expensive to recreate on a soundstage, a detail that lands hard in a market where visual identity can decide whether a movie feels generic or specific.

That is the local argument in plain terms: Alabama locations can give a production texture that reads on screen and still hold up when the film starts collecting trophies. Sloss Furnaces, as a nationally significant industrial landmark and event venue, gave Gunner a rough, unmistakable edge that helped define the movie’s look. For Birmingham boosters, the film’s success is evidence that the city’s architecture, infrastructure and crew base can support ambitious indie work without sanding off the regional character that makes the image memorable in the first place.

The incentive picture helps explain why producers keep looking here. Alabama’s program offers a 35% rebate on payroll paid to Alabama residents and 25% on other qualified production expenses for projects spending $500,000 to $20 million in the state, with incentives applying only to the first $20 million in qualifying expenditures. The Alabama Film Office, founded in 1978 and renamed the Alabama Entertainment Office in 2025 after expanding into music production, has spent decades building that ecosystem. For future indie productions weighing where to go next, Gunner is a useful case study: Birmingham can give a movie a strong look, a workable production base and, if the movie connects, a festival run that travels far beyond Alabama.