Robert De Niro's waiting to lure tourists over sea to Skye

ROBERT De Niro may be more readily associated with the mean streets of New York than the empty glens of the Highlands and Islands, but the legendary cinema hard man is set to give the local tourist industry a major boost with his latest film.

On the eve of publication of a new report that suggests film and TV-related tourism is worth £2.6bn to the UK economy, VisitScotland is working on plans to tap into the tourist potential of De Niro's hit fantasy movie Stardust.

The film, shot largely on Skye and in the West Highlands, features a cast of major stars, including De Niro, Michelle Pfeiffer, Claire Danes, Sienna Miller and Ricky Gervais.

It is already riding high in the US box-office top 10 and on the Internet Movie Database it has scored more highly with the public than Harry Potter And The Order Of The Phoenix and The Simpsons Movie.

Stardust, which screened at the Edinburgh Film Festival last week, will figure in a major international tourism marketing campaign in the new year, including online advertising and a new tourist trail leaflet and map.

"Given the calibre of actors in it, it's going to be a huge movie release and it's a great opportunity," said a spokeswoman for VisitScotland, the national tourism agency.

Rising star Charlie Cox plays a young man who jumps through a hole in a wall and finds himself in a magical world of witches and flying pirate ships. To prove his worth to his sweetheart, he must retrieve a fallen star. The star has taken the Earthly form of Claire Danes.

They go through many adventures, against such dramatic backdrops as Skye's Quiraing mountain and Fairy Glen, and the young hero finally realises where his heart truly lies. De Niro plays a pirate captain.

The film is based on a cult novel by English writer Neil Gaiman. He said: "They were meant to be shooting in Iceland, but they couldn't because you can't bring horses to Iceland, and I got a phone call from Matthew [Vaughn, the director] asking if I had been anywhere that looked cool.

"I had recently been to the Isle of Skye and just said: 'You have to shoot it in Skye in the Fairy Glen,' and they did, and the stuff in Skye looks absolutely stunning. It's a landscape like you've never seen before... Skye is possibly my favourite place in the world, whatever the weather."

The film's £35m budget enabled them to shoot in both Scotland and Iceland. Trish Shorthouse, head of the Scottish Highlands and Islands Film Commission, said: "They were only going to do something like a week in Scotland and we ended up with nearly four weeks. It looks great."

VisitScotland's new marketing campaign will also tap into The Waterhorse, another big-budget fantasy movie, that shot in Scotland and is due out at the end of the year.

The agency is looking to build on the tourist spin-off Scotland got from The Da Vinci Code and other movies shot in Scotland.

The VisitScotland spokeswoman said: "We're still seeing people coming to Scotland because they fell in love with it when they watched Braveheart. People are still visiting Pennan in Aberdeenshire because of Local Hero. There are real, long-lasting benefits for the country with this kind of thing."

Those benefits are spelled out in a new report commissioned by the UK Film Council, the Scottish film agency Scottish Screen and English regional agencies.

Stately Attraction: How Film and Television Programmes Promote Tourism in the UK estimates "screen tourism" - visits inspired by films and television - is worth £2.6bn a year, split equally between film and television.

Scottish locations and films are singled out repeatedly and Braveheart, The Da Vinci Code, Harry Potter, Local Hero, Trainspotting and Monarch Of The Glen are considered in depth.

One of the biggest success stories has been the tourist spin-off from the BBC children's programme Balamory, filmed at Tobermory on Mull.

Visitor numbers to the town rose by 160,000 in 2003 and 2004, an increase of about 40%, according to Dr Joanne Connell, a tourism lecturer at Stirling University who is quoted in the report. The town's population is less than 1,000.

She said it was unique for a tourism boom to be driven by pre-school children. "This has never been seen anywhere else in the world."

James Fraser of VisitScotland said: "A whole generation has been brought up on Balamory and that will leave a legacy. These toddlers will go away with very fond memories and the view is that many of them will grow up and want to come back with their families. We see it as a long-term investment."

Not all films have a tourist spin-off. "Many of the most successful tourism-inducing films and programmes tend to have a positive, uplifting tone, while some grittier, independent productions have less of an impact," says the report.

The most popular locations are historic buildings, stately homes, villages and rural landscapes, with Scotland featuring prominently on all counts.

The report says tourists are generally attracted to sites with strong associations with the story, even if they are not film locations. It also points out that films play an important role in establishing wider, national branding or image.

Braveheart provided a boost for visitor numbers at the Wallace Monument, though it was not in the film, and for Scotland as a whole, even though the film shot partly in Ireland.