INDIANAPOLIS (WISH) — Hollywood comes to the Circle City with a red carpet event

“The Duel,” a feature-length film makes, will make its world premiere on Sunday after a red carpet at the Hilbert Circle Theater on Monument Circle in downtown Indianapolis.

Pigasus Pictures, a film company based in Bloomington, produced the movie. Zach Spicer and Gordon Strain, alumni of Indiana University, founded Pigasus.

It was filmed all across Indiana, at Blue Spring Caverns Park in Bedford, Washington Park Beach in Michigan City, and six different locations in the Indianapolis area.

Strain says they had lots of choices that fit with their vision for the movie, while working around other locations that didn’t fit the original script. “The writers wrote in things like a whiskey bar. I took them to the Inferno Room down in Fountain Square and they’re like, it’s a tiki bar now. There were some adjustments made to locations we had availability to.”

“The Duel” stars Dylan Sprouse, best known for his role as Zack in “The Suite Life of Zack and Cody,” and Callan McAuliffe, who played Aiden in “The Walking Dead.”

Sprouse also serves as the movie’s executive producer.

Spicer says out of all the movies they’ve produced, it probably has the most star power. “It’s a who’s who of people that you may know or are soon to know. María Gabriela de Faría, she is about to be the lead in the new ‘Superman’ movie that comes out next year. She’s one of the lead, bad guys in it, and she’s incredible. The whole cast is. … We were really fortunate.”

The movie follows two friends, played by McAuliffe and Sprouse, on a journey to duel each other.

The movie, while filmed in Indiana, takes place in southern California and Mexico.

“We live here. We love to film here,” Strain said. “Anything we can do to show our state off and do cool things, even though the movie takes place in California and Mexico, we thought we could fake it here.”

“The Duel” is the seventh-feature film of Pigasus. It was founded in 2014.

The film was written and shot in 2020 during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Spicer says it’s been a long journey, and he’s excited for the movie’s release. “This was really exciting. This is the first film of this size that has gotten to this magnitude where we been able to sell it to Lionsgate,” an entertainment company.

As of Friday morning, tickets to the premiere were available. Tickets to a VIP after-party at Newfields were also still available.

The cast and crew will be trotting down the red carpet around 6 p.m. Sunday. “The Duel” makes its world premiere at 7:30 p.m.

“The Duel” can be seen in about 500 other theaters across the country starting July 31.