When The Wizard of Oz at Sphere opens off the Las Vegas Strip on August 28, audiences will experience the 1939 classic like never before. Nearly 18,000 viewers will find themselves in the eye of the tornado that carries Dorothy’s Kansas farmhouse to Munchkinland. The film has been enhanced to fill a 160,000-square-foot LED wall spanning three football fields, encircling the audience and rising 22 stories high, while 750-horsepower fans simulate wind and debris.
The $104-per-seat spectacle represents one of Hollywood’s most significant AI collaborations. Warner Bros, Google, and more than 2,000 creatives—including academics, visual effects artists, and Sphere executives—spent two years enhancing the classic while preserving its original magic, News.Az reports, citing Reuters.
“It definitely represents a meaningful milestone in AI-human creative collaboration,” said Thao Nguyen, immersive arts agent at CAA. The project used archival materials, set blueprints, publicity stills, and research papers to deliver the movie at a ten-fold higher resolution than ever before.
Oscar-winning visual effects supervisor Ben Grossmann explained that AI was used not to replace human creativity but to breathe fresh life into the story. Tiny details, like Dorothy’s freckles and the Scarecrow’s burlap texture, were restored, and images were “outpainted” to fill the Sphere’s massive viewing plane. The filmmakers reimagined cinematography and editing without altering the experience of the beloved film.
Musicians re-recorded the entire score to leverage the Sphere’s 167,000 speakers, while Judy Garland’s and other actors’ original vocal performances remain untouched. Physical effects, including 16-foot-long helium-filled flying monkeys steered by drones, complement the immersive visuals.
Despite some criticism from cinephiles, the creative team defended their approach. “Whenever we made a change, it was because we wanted the audience to experience what Dorothy was experiencing directly,” Grossmann said. The final result combines cinema, live production, and experiential VR, offering a new way to experience a timeless classic.
