Facing more and more competition, whisky distilling ceased on the site in 1957 (rum and industrial alcohol kept it going, as they do many of us) but by 1990, the distillery had closed for good. Gooderham & Worts were (for a while at least) the largest distillery in the world and those buildings date from the company’s beginnings in the 1860s. X-Men location: Magneto discovers his powers in the ‘concentration camp’: Distillery District, Mill Street, Toronto
This is referenced in the grim concentration camp prologue, where young Erik discovers the extraordinary powers that lead to his becoming Magneto, uses what was the old Gooderham & Worts Distillery complex on Mill Street toward the Toronto waterfront. The radical mutant faction is led by Erik Lehnsherr ( Ian McKellen), whose anger stems from having witnessed the horrors of fascism first-hand in the Thirties. Set in 'New York', the film was made almost entirely in Ontario, Canada, even the opening scene, set in ‘Poland, 1944’. Threatened with the introduction of discriminatory laws, ‘mutants’ in the US are facing an age-old dilemma – to work peacefully for equality or to fight back by any means necessary. Bryan Singer paved the way for comic book adaptations to be taken seriously with top-notch casting and no shying away from the political allegory.