Three productions, three cities at the centre
The 1978 film is rooted in Mumbai — then still Bombay on most signage — and the city is not merely backdrop. The criminal underworld Don inhabits feels like an extension of the streets: narrow lanes, crowded markets, the specific texture of the city's lower and middle registers. Vijay, the lookalike recruited to replace him, comes from exactly those streets, which is why the imposture is credible. The geography does moral work: the gap between the slums where Vijay lives and the plush interiors Don controlled maps the same distance the plot asks him to cross.
The 2006 remake, directed by Farhan Akhtar, shifts its centre of gravity outward. Mumbai remains the starting point, but the action moves into an international register — Kuala Lumpur features prominently, its skyline and sleek transit infrastructure standing in for a globalised criminal network that the original's Bombay-bound story never needed to invoke. This is not merely a visual upgrade; it signals a different understanding of what organised crime is. Where the original's Don ran something local and hierarchical, the remake's Don operates across borders, and the locations make that legible without exposition.
Malaysia was a practical choice as well as a thematic one: production incentives and the visual distinctiveness of Kuala Lumpur's architecture gave the film a look that separated it cleanly from both its source and from the run of contemporaneous Hindi films shot in European cities. The Petronas Towers appear; so do highways and hotels that read as anonymous international wealth rather than any specific cultural identity — which suits a film about a man whose identity is, structurally, in question.
The 2011 continuation extends the international scope further, adding European locations — notably Germany — to the mix. Berlin provides the sequel with its climactic sequences, and the shift to Europe sharpens the franchise's aspirations toward a Euro-thriller visual grammar, where heritage architecture and high-speed infrastructure share the frame.
What changes across these three productions is not only the look but the implied scale of the world the films inhabit. The original is a city film; the remake is a regional-to-global film; the sequel commits to a genuinely transnational geography. Each location choice is also a claim about what kind of thriller this is and how large a stage its characters deserve.