Luxury rental buildings in Manhattan include, from far left, New York by Gehry, 8 Spruce Street; MiMA, 450 West 42nd Street; Silver Towers, 610-620 42nd Street; Aire at 200 West 67th Street; and the Beatrice, 839 Avenue of the Americas.

ON a recent Sunday afternoon, as filmgoers at the AMC Loews Lincoln Center settled in with their tubs of popcorn and vats of soda to see the new thriller “Limitless,” what seemed like a traditional movie trailer began.

Between the sweeping shots of Manhattan fast-paced cuts showed glimpses of city landmarks, bustling streets, crowded subways and strollers ambling over the Brooklyn Bridge. As the pulse of the music intensified, New York was depicted in constant motion, with clouds racing above the soaring towers, and with one newcomer to the skyline — its undulating steel skin glistening gold in the sunshine — playing a starring role.

As the trailer ended, four simple words flashed onto the screen: “New York by Gehry.”

It was not a teaser for the newest Hollywood blockbuster. The pitch was for the latest addition to the luxury high-rise rental market in the city, a 76-story tower designed by Frank Gehry at 8 Spruce Street, on the edge of the financial district.

The feature film that followed, “Limitless,” explores what happens when someone taps the full potential of his brain. The Gehry building — along with a dozen other new large-scale luxury rental buildings that have gone on the market in the last year —   is testing the limits of the price renters will pay for what developers call “aspirational living.” 

Even in a city not known for restraint when it comes to displays of wealth and status the properties — with their tens of thousands of square feet dedicated to amenities like private screening rooms, sprawling gyms and even a dog spa — are something new in the rental market.

The decision by developers to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on rental projects that in past years would most likely have been high-end condos was driven by a number of factors.

In the boom years, developers say, the market was oversaturated with new luxury condo construction. At the same time, and even in the worst period of the recession, rental vacancy rates in Manhattan remained low, never creeping above 3 percent. As lending tightened banks leery of new home construction were more willing to finance rental projects. Then, even that financing dried up. As a result the new mega-rental complexes have the field to themselves, at least for the time being, as few similarly ambitious projects are on the horizon.

More fundamentally people are questioning whether it makes more sense to buy or rent a home in what remains a fragile and often confounding market. Developers are betting that at least for now even those with the money to buy may choose to hang on the sidelines and rent, even if it costs them some very big dollars. 

Prices at many of these new luxury rental buildings start as much as 20 percent higher than similar properties already on the market. At the Beatrice in Midtown, for instance, the starting price for studios is more than $3,000 a month; one-bedrooms start at $4,500; and the four penthouses $20,000 per month. Those prices are similar to 8 Spruce Street, where rents start at $2,630 a month for studios and top out at $25,000 a month for three-bedroom penthouses.

MaryAnne Gilmartin, an executive vice president of Forest City Ratner, which developed the Gehry building, said that when the project was taking shape in 2007 including 200 condo units on the top floors was “seriously contemplated.” 

“It seemed worth studying because you could create something very special,” Ms. Gilmartin said. But it was the height of the condo craze, before the bust. “We saw the potential oversupply of condos and we were taken aback by it,” she said.

Forest City Ratner had wiggle room, because it had bought the land in 2004, when land prices were less expensive. By 2007 land prices were so high that most developers thought they could make money only by building condos. 

“We believed there would not be a tremendous number of new rentals,” she said. 

The decision to make the entire building rental, with 901 apartments, now seems prescient. But in the end it will all come down to whether the apartments at 8 Spruce Street are priced correctly.

Ms. Gilmartin said that she believed that upscale rental properties appealed to “a generation of young people who don’t have the same interest in buying,” and people living an “untethered” lifestyle. There are also those who might have trouble securing a mortgage and older people looking to downscale, she said, echoing other developers.

At a time when potential buyers are still worried about the future of the real estate market, developers believe the best way to win tenants in a competitive environment is to offer renters the perks that once came only with upscale condo complexes.

The latest entry into the field is MiMA, a 63-story glass tower on 42nd Street between 9th and 10th Avenues in Midtown Manhattan that started offering rental leases on its 500 apartments last month. Among its list of attractions are exclusive access to the M Club, “a 44,000-square-foot hand-crafted amenity space that caters to and enhances the daily lives of residents.”

Even its arty-sounding name is a measure of its ambition. MiMA, an abbreviation for middle of Manhattan, is an attempt to rechristen a neighborhood long known as plain old Midtown West or, more ominously, Hell’s Kitchen.

While offering ample room for luxuries like a full-size basketball court and a residents-only Equinox gym, Gregory H. Gushée, a senior vice president of Related, the project’s developer, said the units were configured in such a way as to get 500 rentals where plans had initially called for 460. Even though rents start at $3,300 for a small studio, Mr. Gushée said that he was confident that the top-tier service would justify top-tier prices.

“I think there will be a few years of rents just going up because there is nothing being built,” he said. 

Renters may be paying more, but they aren’t getting more space in many of the new buildings. Developers say that renters do not make the same price-per-square-foot calculation as buyers, and that smaller apartments — with some studios less than 500 square feet and larger one-bedrooms barely topping 1,000 square feet — will not discourage the target audience. And while computer-assisted layouts have often been employed to make the most efficient use of every inch of space, these buildings frequently provide rooms for giving parties, screening movies and entertaining guests. 

MiMA, where renters will start moving in April 15, joins buildings including the 60-story Silver Towers at 610-620 42nd Street with 1,276 rental units; the 52-story Beatrice at 839 Avenue of the Americas with 301 rentals; the sprawling T. F. Cornerstone project that stretches several blocks along West 37th Street with more than 1,000 rental units; and the Ohm, a bit farther south in Chelsea at 312 11th Avenue, a 34-story building with 369 rental units. Additionally, two smaller projects are in the mix, the 101-unit +aRt at 537 West 27th Street and the 89-unit Port 10 at 303 10th Avenue.

All these projects were completed in 2010, the last chapter of a building boom that stretched through much of the decade. 

On the Upper West Side, several luxury rental buildings of similar scale also opened over the course of 2010, including the 42-story Aire at 200 West 67th Street, with 310 rentals; the Corner at 200 West 72nd Street, with 192 rentals on 19 floors; the Ashley at 400 West 63rd, with 209 rentals on 25 floors; and the Aldyn, a 40-story building with 136 rental units at 60 Riverside Boulevard. In some of the buildings, like the Aldyn, +aRt and MiMA, condominiums are also in the mix.

Gary L. Malin, the president of Citi Habitats, one of the largest residential rental brokers in New York, said that the roughly 3,000 new luxury rental units on the market in the past year might seem too much for the city to absorb, but in reality were just a drop in the bucket. Many of the buildings that opened in 2010 are already nearing full occupancy, he said.

What all the buildings share are soaring prices.

Yet while the top-priced apartments costing tens of thousands of dollars a month have received a lot of the attention, they make up a relatively small fraction of the inventory. 

It will be the leasing of studios and one- and two-bedrooms that will determine the success of the projects, developers say.

For renters like Christy McCullough, who was one of the first to snap up an apartment at the Corner on the Upper West Side, renting simply made more sense than buying.

“We were looking to downsize,” Ms McCullough said in an interview in her impeccably appointed, sunny one-bedroom apartment. One-bedrooms in the building start at about $5,000 a month.

She was so thrilled with the place that she signed a two-year lease; her daughter is also renting an apartment in the building.

When the buildings opened many developers were offering breaks for renters, like paying broker’s fees and a month’s rent for one-year lease, which adds up quickly, given the prices. 

The Corner, nearly full, is no longer offering incentives.

Jeffrey E. Levine, the president of Levine Builders, which operates Douglaston Development, which built the Ohm in Chelsea, said that until last year high-end rental projects were taking something of a beating.

If developers had projected getting $65 per square foot, he said, they received closer to $50 per square foot because of the many concessions. 

But the tide began to turn in 2010, just as many of the more ambitious projects were coming onto the market. The Ohm is now fully leased and is  concentrating on renewals.

If taking a hit in the beginning by offering incentives helps fill up a building, Mr. Levine said, it is worth it because when it comes time for renewals there is less pressure to offer incentives not only to new renters, but also to those already in the building.

Developers like to keep the monthly rents at the peak of what they think the market will bear, because it is much harder to raise rents than it is to cut incentives.

And in the end even the Gehry building, celebrated by both architectural critics and casual observers for what it looks like on the outside, has to convince people to pay for what is on the inside.