Where Was ‘Don’t Say Good Luck’ Filmed?

Don’t Say Good Luck gives the familiar high-school musical story a considerably heavier burden to carry. Sunny Sandler stars as Sophie Birenbaum, a 15-year-old theater kid who unexpectedly wins the lead role of Jenna in her school’s production of Waitress. Her biggest artistic opportunity arrives almost simultaneously with devastating news: her mother Elizabeth’s cancer has returned and is terminal. Julia Hart’s film follows Sophie trying to remain a teenager, daughter and performer while those parts of her life become increasingly difficult to separate.

Melanie Lynskey and Max Greenfield play Sophie’s parents, with Stephanie Beatriz, Jack Champion, Bebe Neuwirth, Steve Buscemi and Jon Lovitz among the supporting cast. Although the movie’s world feels like one coherent suburban community, the production actually assembled it from locations across northern and central New Jersey, including Livingston, Ridgewood, Paramus, Montclair, Cranford, Madison, Jersey City and at least one additional Bergen County stop in Lyndhurst.

Livingston: Birenbaum’s Deli

Few locations in Don’t Say Good Luck are as closely tied to the Birenbaum family as their deli. The filmmakers found its real-world counterpart at Nana’s Deli & Restaurant, 127 South Livingston Avenue in Livingston. Production temporarily changed the restaurant into Birenbaum’s, Est. 1985, replacing the storefront identity and dressing the windows with references to matzo ball soup, Reubens, pastrami, knishes and other deli staples.

Nana’s closed for several days during the early July 2025 shoot before reopening on July 9. The location works particularly well because the deli does not feel like an anonymous set built solely for exposition. It looks lived in, slightly crowded and specific to the family operating it, which gives Sophie’s home life a cultural identity beyond what happens at school. Netflix also notes that the deli walls contain real family photographs supplied by people involved with the production.

Livingston provided another restaurant location as well. Ilpoom, a Korean restaurant in town, hosted filming, although production reports have not clearly matched the property to a particular finished scene.

Ridgewood: Sophie’s School

The school material led the production north to Benjamin Franklin Middle School at 335 North Van Dien Avenue in Ridgewood. Crews were working there on July 29, 2025, with the Netflix production occupying the real public school for filming.

The choice matters because so much of Sophie’s emotional life is attached to the musical. Rehearsals, auditions and performances are not simply extracurricular background. The stage becomes the place where she processes emotions that are far harder to articulate at home.

Location reporting identifies Benjamin Franklin Middle School as a major setting for those school and theatrical sequences. Its real auditorium and educational spaces allowed Hart to keep the high-school production deliberately modest rather than making Sophie’s Waitress look suspiciously like a Broadway revival.

Paramus Park Mall

The production also used Paramus Park, the shopping mall at 700 Paramus Park in Bergen County. Its appearance connects to one of the movie’s lighter mother-daughter interludes, when Elizabeth helps Sophie explore Jenna’s Southern accent by trying different voices while the two are out shopping.

It is an ordinary teenage setting, which is exactly why the location works. Much of Don’t Say Good Luck is about Sophie attempting to continue doing normal things even as her family is confronting something profoundly abnormal. The mall sequence lets the movie briefly behave like a conventional coming-of-age comedy before grief moves back into the foreground.

Montclair High School

Montclair High School at 100 Chestnut Street was another education-related filming site. New Jersey reporting confirms that Don’t Say Good Luck worked at the school during the summer production schedule.

More detailed location reports identify the school’s amphitheater as the setting used for the graduation material. Using multiple schools is common in film production, particularly when a story requires different auditoriums, classrooms and exterior spaces that cannot all be found conveniently on one campus.

That also explains why Sophie’s fictional school should not be treated as a single real building. Ridgewood and Montclair contribute different pieces to what ultimately appears as one school environment onscreen.

Cranford and Maple Street

Cranford supplied the residential side of Sophie’s world. Production spent time around Maple Street, where filming took place at a private home and along the surrounding street. IMDb’s production listing specifically records Maple Street as a filming location, while later New Jersey coverage confirms that the movie shot in Cranford during Sandler’s extended Garden State production period.

The house itself is private property, so there is little reason to turn its exact number into a visitor destination. What matters visually is Cranford’s established suburban character, which gives the Birenbaums’ domestic scenes a believable contrast with the busier school, theater and deli locations.

Drew University in Madison

The crew moved to Drew University, 36 Madison Avenue in Madison, during late July. Local production signs for set access, trucks and catering appeared around campus, and Adam and Sunny Sandler were reported there during filming.

Public reports do not provide a reliable scene-by-scene breakdown for the Drew footage, so identifying a particular campus building as Sophie’s school or another fictional institution would be speculative. The university remains a confirmed production location, however, and expands the movie’s New Jersey footprint into Morris County.

Jersey City and Lyndhurst

Jersey City served as one of the broader production bases for Don’t Say Good Luck. Production tracking places filming there from July 2, 2025, with principal photography continuing until approximately September 12. The city appears to have supported several portions of the shoot rather than one widely publicized landmark sequence.

There is also evidence for an additional stop in Lyndhurst that has received much less attention. Township records from July 2025 list Netflix’s Don’t Say Good Luck in connection with 1 Stuyvesant Avenue and 18 Park Avenue. The municipal record does not explain what scene was filmed there, so those addresses are best treated as production locations rather than assigned fictional settings.

That wide spread of locations is one of the more interesting things about the movie’s production. Don’t Say Good Luck does not need New Jersey to impersonate some distant place. Instead, Hart uses actual malls, schools, restaurants, campuses and suburban streets to build Sophie’s community piece by piece. The result is appropriately unflashy. This is a story about a teenager whose world becomes enormous because of what is happening inside her family, even though the places around her remain reassuringly ordinary.