november11–24, 2019 | newyork 43has been by online shopping on one side and
discounters on the other. Recent years have
seen a great mall die-off, and mall vacancy rates
this year are at their highest since 2011.
And yet—here we are in 2019, zombie survi-
vors of the “retail apocalypse” surveying the
wreckage, and all over New York, here come the
malls. The last few years have seen a bubbling up
of megaproperties that combine retail, office
space, residential space, and dining; and now,
nothing less than the American Dream, which
opened in October. We have finally achieved the
AmericanDream,andit is a shoppingandenter-
tainment center in East Rutherford, New Jersey.
The American Dream, as soon-to-be-real-
ized, is a kind of apotheosis of a new model of
mall shopping—it is, at the very least, the most
expensive mall ever built in the U.S. (Current
cost estimates put it at around $5.7 billion and
counting.) Its CEO, Don Ghermezian, and the
Canadian development group Triple Five, are
making a bet that the shopping
of the future won’t just happen
online, with purchases deliv-
ered by drone, from the com-
fortable sanctuary of your
hand computer. They think
that IRL retail can continue,
that even malls can rise again if
they only get fun.
American Dream is full of it.
The complex opened in Octo-
ber, not with any of its retail
ready but with a $550 million
Nickelodeon Universe Theme
Park, with a PAW Patrol Adventure Bay, Dora’s
(asin, the Explorer) Sky Railway, and two Teen-
age Mutant Ninja Turtles roller coasters. An
American Dream ice rink, regulation size, will
host NHL-team practices. Next up comes the
DreamWorks Waterpark. The snow machines
are already churning to supply the 16-story
indoor ski slope, which will open later this fall.
AtAmerican Dream, says Ken Downing, a
28-year veteran of Neiman Marcus who jumped
ship to American Dream this spring, you can ski
orge t a tan under the glass atrium in the water
park—365 days a year.
How could this mall fall? A better question
might be: How could it not? It is the realization
of a project that has been in the works, under a
different name and buoyed by different backers,
for going on 20 years, gaining in cost as it goes:
The bottom fell out of an earlier version, then
called Xanadu, during the great crash of 2008–9.
But Downing says he believes they’ve already
spawned imit hough they hardly need
them—plans a dy under way for centers
like American Dream around the U.S., in Miami
and, potentially, Vegas and California.
—MATTHEW SCHNEIERJulia Roberts Will Still Be Starring in
New Romantic Comedies. So Will
Humphrey Bogart and Bette Davis.IN ANG LEE’S new movie Gemini Man, Will
Smith plays a middle-aged assassin who finds
out his bosses have cloned him and that his
younger double—who is also played by Smith, or
at least a swarm of pixels moving in his shape and
under his control—wants to kill him and steal his
job. It might’ve been inspired by a true story.
Gemini Man flopped—it only made $20 mil-
lioninitsfirst weekend—butthinkof it as an
investment. To create their own clone of Smith,
the moviemakers didn’t just airbrush his wrin-
kles or paste footage of his younger face onto
somebody else’s head, like in that deep-fake video
where Bill Hader morphs into Arnold Schwar-
zenegger; they built a complete digital replica of
a 23-year-old Smith, with a body and facial mus-
cles that moved on the 51-year-old Smith’s com-
mand (he wore a motion-capture suit to perform
as his younger self ). And now Hollywood has an
ageless computer- generated copy of one of the
most bankable actors in history to use however it
wants—in sequels to Independence Day and Men
in Black, or a reboot of The Fresh Prince of Bel-
Air, or any other part the real Smith is too old or
eventually too dead to play—plus the technology
to digitize other stars, too.
None of the makers of Gemini Man has actu-
ally suggested the effects developed for their
movie are intended to replace the real Smith or
any of his carbon-based peers, probably to avoid
riots by the Screen Actors Guild, but this is
almost certainly inevitable. In every year of the
past decade, at least seven of the top-ten-gross-
ing movies have been sequels, remakes, or other
extensions of preexisting franchises. Many of
those franchises star humans who will someday
get old and die or just decide they don’t want to
play superheroes or Jedi anymore. Studios can
recast their roles or make spinoff movies revolv-
ing around younger characters, but that doesn’t
always work, and in most cases, franchises have
rejected new stars like bad organ transplants:
For every Michael B. Jordan, who successfully
unseated Sylvester Stallone at the head of the
Rocky franchise, there’s a Jeremy Renner, who
was supposed to but didn’t replace Tom Cruise in
the Mission: Impossible series and Matt Damon
in the Bourne movies; plus a Shia LaBeouf and a
Chris Pratt, both of whom were hired to succeed
Harrison Ford in Indiana Jones reboots that
never happened; and also an Alden Ehrenreich,
who took over Ford’s role as Han Solo in the only
Star Wars movie to lose money. If studios can
prolong or revive their most valuable franchises
with CGI that can bring back the old, dead, or
burned-out actors who most profitably led them,
they will. And a 35-year-old Ford will return toAPR 23
Gemini Man
trailer is
released,
starring Will
Smith and ...
Will Smith.
The16-story
indoorski-
and-
snowboard
parkscheduled
toopenat
American
Dream.