ATLANTIC CITY — Let’s be honest, every inch of this picturesque town with a thousand unresolved plot lines could be a movie set.
But for now, it’s an all-but-vacant former luxury mall — with 17 kitchens — sitting atop a pier jutting over the Atlantic Ocean, that ACX1 Studios wants to turn into Atlantic City’s version of Hollywood or CityWalk at Universal Studios.
Or at least for starters, a home for a big-time television cooking show like, say, Hell’s Kitchen.
An enticing tax credit
The former Playground Pier, formerly the Pier at Caesars, formerly the Ocean One Mall, formerly the Million Dollar Pier, a 550,000-square-foot building with a three-sided ocean view jutting out from the center of Atlantic City’s Boardwalk, is now set to be remade into a series of studio spaces and sound stages for television and movie sets. The pier itself is owned by Caesars, which has leased the structure to ACX1 Studios.
Cue the skeptics? Not when you consider that New Jersey offers a 35% tax credit to companies filming in South Jersey, which has proven to be an enticement.
Last year, Netflix bought the former Fort Monmouth Army Base in Monmouth County for a production studio that it described to the Asbury Park Press as its East Coast production hub.
The incentive is the New Jersey Film and Digital Media Tax Credit program, which Gov. Phil Murphy signed into law in 2018 to encourage film and television studios and productions to choose New Jersey, and in particular South Jersey. (North Jersey’s incentive is a 30% tax credit).
More than a studio
The partners at ACX1, who held a launch party and performance earlier this month, also plan a brewery, a Laff House comedy venue, a coffee shop, a couple of new restaurants, a video production rental shop, an arcade bar, and as many of the mall’s former tenants — are you listening Apple? — that can be enticed to return.
The group also wants to stage events and entertainment, host parties and wrestling tournaments, all aimed toward a grand opening in time for next summer.
“Our overall vision is for it to be a CityWalk like Florida has at Universal Studios,” said entrepreneur Dom Franklin, the CEO of ACX1, who will focus on events at the Pier. “Movie sets and limited shopping, restaurants and attractions. Something for a family. Caesars believed we can pull it off.”
Other founding partners are real estate acquisition specialist Christopher Aponte, music distributor Rob Schwartz, and Roy Koriakin and Joe Hennigan, business partners in Kphat Productions, which recently produced the finale of the Amazing Race in Philadelphia. Hennigan is Kphat’s director of photography.
“It’s mind-blowing that something that big and beautiful could be there with nothing in it for so many years, and nobody wanted it,” said Koriakin. “I’ve been there 100 times now. There’s always something new that I find. A new roof. I found a golf cart the other day.”
Or say the big Buddha from the old Buddakan, or the midcentury decor of the old Continental. “It’s so ginormous,” he said. “We just started looking for investors.”
The heart of the venture, said Koriakin and Franklin, is luring movies and television shows to Atlantic City to take advantage of very generous New Jersey tax credits.
“We’re going to create sound stages and build sets,” said Koriakin. “We’ll build a hospital wing, and a detective/police law and order set. We’ll go after those cop shows in New York. Their tax credit is not great. They’ve got one or two little studios that are booked 12 months out.”
What will the transformation look like?
One first step might not please the casual Boardwalk stroller: ACX1 is shutting down the third floor of the pier, which remained a popular place for people to sit on Adirondack chairs and look out over the ocean.
Previously home to Continental, Buddakan, and other restaurants, that space will now form the main portion for studio sets and sound stages. The fourth floor will continue to be a wedding venue, One Atlantic Ocean, Koriakin said.
The pier was most recently a failed venture of developer Bart Blatstein, who tried to turn it into “T Street,” with a series of bars, restaurants, and music venues. Blatstein has since turned his attention to Showboat Hotel and the new Island Water Park.
Caesars transferred the master lease for the pier to ACX1, allowing the company to lease the space to a variety of stores, or otherwise do what they want with the empty mall. (Only It’s Sugar, at the front, is operational.)
“There’s a lot of things we can do right now,” Franklin said. “There’s so many different locations and storefronts. It depends on what they’re trying to film. We can build a jail cell, do a nightclub scene.”
Koriakin said the group, while somewhat stymied by the ongoing writers and actors’ union strike, is in contact with two different films that might shoot at the Pier, plus “a huge TV show that wants to shoot here for the next two seasons, a cooking show.”
They are waiting for a clarification on whether the tax credit would apply to a cooking show as a competition show and not a reality show. He said the show could be shot in the atrium, where a high-tech water show once lured tourists, but was dismantled by Blatstein, with a studio audience.
Atlantic City has appeared in numerous films over the years (famously in Louis Malle’s Atlantic City, shot all over town, including the Knife & Fork Inn). HBO’s Boardwalk Empire was mostly filmed in a makeshift Boardwalk in a studio in Brooklyn.
State officials said the tax credit program led to $650 million of in-state production spending in 2022 and the creation of over 8,500 jobs.
In 2019, the film Army of the Dead, about a group of mercenaries who attempt to steal millions left behind in a casino vault after Las Vegas is overrun by zombies, found the empty (and decrepit) Atlantic Club casino and the then-empty Showboat perfect backdrops.
Inquirer staff photographer Elizabeth Robertson contributed to this article.