The design brief for Studio City was theatrical from the start. The Los Angeles-based Goddard Group, the same firm that designed Galaxy Macau, was asked to evoke the Golden Age of Hollywood filtered through an Art Deco sensibility. What emerged was something wilder: two hotel towers — Star Tower and Celebrity Tower — styled as though two asteroids had crashed through a Gotham City skyscraper, leaving the building standing and smoking around the impact. The visual reference is intentional. Studio City built Batman Dark Flight, a 4D flight simulation theatre, and the Warner Brothers Fun Zone, a 40,000-square-foot children's playground inside the resort. The architecture and the attractions were conceived as a single statement. The building is the ride. Guests step into a fantasy the moment the facade comes into view, before they've entered a door.

Between the two towers, at the height of the 23rd floor, Studio City installed the world's first figure-8 ferris wheel. It was called the Golden Reel. The wheel's 17 steampunk-themed cabins, each holding up to 10 passengers, were designed by the Goddard Group and manufactured by Intamin Amusement Rides of Liechtenstein. Boarding at that altitude means the wheel carries passengers above the Cotai Strip roofline, high enough for views across the reclaimed land toward Coloane's hills and the Pearl River estuary. The figure-8 shape — a lemniscate, technically, the symbol for infinity — means passengers experience a crossing point at the wheel's center, a moment where one loop transitions to the other that has no equivalent on a conventional ferris wheel. It was a genuine engineering first, and in a district where every resort competed to claim the superlative, Studio City built something that no one else had.

The path to the October 2015 opening was long. The project was initially developed without a casino by U.S. investment firms Silver Point Capital and Oaktree Capital Management alongside Hong Kong entertainment company eSun Holdings. A casino was not part of the original plan. Taubman Centers came in as an early investor in the retail component, then withdrew its US$65 million when its contingent financing conditions expired in August 2009 — the same year that the global financial crisis was grinding casino development across Cotai to a halt. Melco Crown Entertainment acquired eSun's controlling interest in June 2011 and restructured the project around a full integrated resort model. The casino element was added. The vision was enlarged. What had started as a media-and-retail entertainment complex became something much larger and significantly more expensive before it finally opened.

Studio City's explicit ambition was to be a resort first and a casino second — or at least to be publicly understood that way. The resort's entertainment layer is dense: Legend Heroes Park offers immersive technology-based experiences; the 5,000-seat Studio City Event Center hosts concerts and sporting events; an indoor and outdoor water park opened in May 2021. The Star Tower carries a five-star Forbes Travel Guide rating and houses Michelin-starred restaurant Pearl Dragon alongside Bi Ying, Rossi Trattoria, and Hide Yamamoto. Pacha Macau nightclub operates from within the tower. In December 2020, the Star Tower was among the first hotels worldwide to receive Sharecare Health Security certification from Forbes Travel Guide. The resort's Phase 2 expansion added two new hotel towers with approximately 900 rooms, with the W Macau — Studio City announced in December 2021 bringing Marriott's W brand to Macau for the first time.

One detail in Studio City's Phase 2 development stands out from the usual casino expansion language. The two new hotel towers were designed with deliberate spacing between them to create adequate corridors for bird migration. Studio City sits near the Taipa Grande Natural Park nature reserve, and the architects accounted for the movement of wetland birds through the area when positioning the towers. It is an unusual consideration to find embedded in a project otherwise concerned with gaming areas, cineplexes, and exhibition halls — but it reflects the Macau government's conditions for the land concession. The resort that styled itself after Gotham City ended up making room, quietly, for the birds passing through.