It’s Landmark

I may have to revise my movie-watching criteria (as related in the previous post) to the following:

*Star Wars

*Lord of the Rings

*based on someone whom I once knew 

*featuring a mall which I once knew

The trailer for next year’s Wonder Woman 1984 is out.  Some scenes for the movie were filmed at Landmark Mall in western Alexandria.  The mall can be seen in the trailer between 0:33 and 0:47. 

Landmark was the local mall from my childhood onward, and the mall that I knew best.  It wasn’t the fun mall for hanging out when I was a teenager; that honor would probably have gone to Springfield Mall.  But Landmark was, for many decades, a dependable place to buy socks.

Wonder Woman 1984 uses Landmark as a typical shopping mall of the Eighties, but, ironically, what one sees in the movie is not how Landmark looked in 1984.  Landmark was originally an open-air mall; it underwent renovations in the late Eighties and reopened as en enclosed mall in 1990.  

Landmark was available for filming because it is the stereotypically dying modern mall; for the last few years it has been entirely unoccupied except for an anemic Sears.  The mall is slated to be torn down and turned into a mixed-use retail and residential development. 

But we’ll always have Wonder Woman 1984.