Cotai’s first new resort in three years, Studio City, had a movie theme and its own specially commissioned film, The Audition, starring Brad Pitt, Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert De Niro and director Martin Scorsese. Cotai’s second new resort since 2012, billionaire Steve Wynn’s Wynn Palace has a floral theme, but it’s playing a movie angle, too. In this case, the film is, like Wynn’s impeccable sense of design and style, an enduring classic, Back to Future. Wynn Palace is built as if 26 straight months of gaming revenue declines, overwhelmingly at the high end, never happened and that a return to the good old days of high rollers just past the Prada in its Wynn Esplanade shopping area. Reaching out to the mass market in recognition of Macau’s so-called “new normal” and spending hundreds of millions of dollars on non-gaming attractions, as Melco Crown did at Studio City, are foolish distractions, in Wynn’s world. There’s a sizeable contingent of gaming executives that agree with that view and still more loath to disagree with Steve Wynn. And Macau’s losing streak ended after Wynn Palace opened in August, which boosters say isn’t a coincidence.

Steve Wynn calls Wynn Palace, his new resort in Macau’s Cotai district, “the world’s most beautiful hotel,” but it ignores Macau’s so- called “new normal” at its own peril. (Photo Credit: Isaac Lawrence/AFP/Getty Images)

Wynn Palace is a very big deal for Wynn Resorts and its local subsidiary Wynn Macau. The $4.2 billion resort establishes its presence in Cotai, almost nine years to the day after Steve Wynn’s purported archrival, Las Vegas Sands founder Sheldon Adelson, opened Venetian Macao and began shifting Macau’s center of gaming gravity from the traditional downtown hub to this landfill between the city’s outer islands of Coloane and Taipa. Wynn reportedly declined Adelson’s suggestion to join him in that first Cotai wave, instead arriving several billion dollars in LVS Cotai Ebitda later. Along with geography, Wynn Palace changes Wynn’s Macau scale, more than doubling its number of rooms, mass gaming tables and slot machines.

If that sounds like a turn toward the middle market, listen more closely. Addressing the media, Steve Wynn called guest rooms “affordable” at $250 on weeknights, $350 on weekends, about double Macau’s average rate. Wynn Palace has a lot of public artwork on display but not all has mass appeal; shortly after the opening, Jeff Koons’ $34 million Tulips sprouted signs asking onlookers not to throw coins at its stainless steel petals. My 9-year-old daughter wondered why she couldn’t ride the flower sculpture carousel or Ferris wheel. Many mass customers find the 11-minute cable car ride around the resort’s eight-acre (3.25 hectare) Performance Lake expensive at MOP100 ($12.50), even though it’s cheaper than Studio City’s Golden Reel observation wheel and Batman ride or ascending the half-scale Eiffel Tower at Adelson’s new Parisian. Retail offerings are relentlessly luxurious. Wynn Palace’s most extraordinary feature may be the expansive lawns and 45-meter swimming pools behind each of its five garden suites, something just a few hundred specially invited guests and their entourages will see every year.

“Wynn has always been focused on the upper end of the scale, whether it is in Vegas, the Macau peninsula or Cotai,” Buckingham Group Director of Equity Research Christopher Jones says. “Across the board from retail, F&B, room prices, Wynn is positioned for a specific type of customer.”

Not that there’s anything wrong with that. In the comprehensive leisure and tourism destination Macau government wants to create, there should be a place for what Steve Wynn calls “the world’s most beautiful hotel.” That argument would be more credible if Wynn Palace wasn’t such a blatantly supersized version of Wynn Macau. It would also be a more sensible business proposition if the year was 2013.

From the end of 2013 through the first half of this year, Macau’s gaming revenue fell by $18 billion, 85% of the reduction, or $15.4 billion, from the VIP sector. The Back to the Future crowd remains confident that once mainland China’s economic growth picks up and President Xi Jinping’s corruption crackdown slows down, that money and more will flow back. You may believe China can grow at 9% again and that leadership will abandon a popular political program, but a bigger issue looms.

New research from Morgan Stanley shows Macau is the least profitable VIP environment for both casino operators and junket promoters, and offers the lowest rebates to players, due to taxes and other market conditions. At the same time, more jurisdictions keep easing restrictions on Chinese visitors and casino operators from Sydney to Seoul, Saipan to Phnom Penh are building compelling resorts, with high rollers the most tempting targets. In short, Chinese travelers have more options and those at the top of the pyramid have the most.

That doesn’t mean Macau’s VIP trade is finished, but its challenging times will surely continue. With Macau’s penetration rate (visitors divided by total source market population) for the mainland market still below 2% and the middle class leading China’s outbound travel surge, the mass market looks like Macau’s best growth opportunity. Yet it’s difficult to see how Wynn Palace attracts that market. In fact, I asked Wynn executives that very question: For a mainland couple with $3,000 or so and a few days to spend on a holiday, why will Wynn Palace convince them to come to Macau (again)?

Wynn didn’t respond.