Why is jail calling?
Scott receives a call from the San Francisco County Jail where his daughter Cassie is being held. He meets Hope at the facility and they bail Cassie out.
For all the visual trickery seen later in this film with the Quantum Realm, and super heroes shrinking and growing, scenes with visual effects which pass the audience by unnoticed are some of the best and most clever shots there can be.
For the most part, Quantumania was shot in London. While there were shots of San Francisco taken, these were shot separately and used as background plates as necessary. Paul Rudd also ended up filming some of the opening and closing moments in San Pedro, CA, which stood in for the Northern California town. Shots with other principal cast members (such as Evangeline Lilly and Kathryn Newton) were filmed around the London area. This becomes the first clue that there is more going on in this brief scene than first becomes obvious.
Director Payton Reed was interviewed during the making of Quantumania, where he talked about using The Volume on the episodes of Star Wars: The Mandalorian that he directed. The Volume is a digital space where a live, digital background can be projected onto the walls for the actors to see and interact with. The background in this case is a reversed (flipped left to right) image of San Francisco’s Union Square, taken from the vantage point in front of the Williams-Sonoma store. The large, white, SFPD Mobile Command truck (on the left of the image above) appears to be often parked at this location, but no police station is actually located here. It would seem that the front of the police station was built as a set inside The Volume, with this background projected behind it. But this gets even weirder, since the police building appears to be based on another real San Francisco location.
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Street View
The “jail” itself appears to be based on the Central Police Station in the North Beach district of San Francisco (766 Vallejo St). The front area, where Scott and Hope are standing include the same textured walls, the large SFPD stickers on the glass, and even a vending machine just outside the main door. These can be seen in the Google Street View below. Reverse shots of Cassie and the officers at the desk are most certainly a set, regardless of whether or not it is based on a real location. The only other clue that the production did not film at this real location is the view across the street from the police station, which in this case is a parking garage.
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Street View
(Ant-Man and The Wasp: Quantumania, 2023)
MCU: Location Scout 