The Wizard of Oz at Sphere

A 1939 film rebuilt for a wall of LEDs

The source is MGM's The Wizard of Oz, directed by Victor Fleming and released in 1939 — shot in the Academy ratio for cinema screens a tiny fraction of the surface it now occupies. The container is what changed. Sphere's interior display runs to roughly 160,000 square feet of LED wrapped around and above the audience at 16K resolution, a canvas with no precedent in film exhibition and no existing film cut to fit it. Sphere Entertainment's bet was that a picture predating widescreen could be opened out to fill the room rather than sit as a small rectangle inside it.

Sphere Studios took the project on with Warner Bros. Pictures, with Jane Rosenthal and Ben Grossmann producing, Jennifer Lame editing, Zack Winokur as creative director and Paul Freeman as principal audio artist. Grossmann also led the visual effects work, which was spread across Crafty Apes, Digital Domain, Gradient Effects, Haymaker VFX, Zoic Studios and Magnopus. Google's AI models, including Veo 2 and Imagen 3, handled super-resolution on the 1939 negative and generated material to extend shots beyond their original framing. About 1.2 petabytes of data went through the pipeline. The budget landed at around $100m, roughly double early estimates and, adjusted for inflation, close to four times what the original film cost.

What the 75-minute cut leaves in

The Sphere version runs 75 minutes against the original's 101. The Cowardly Lion's number, If I Were King of the Forest, is gone, and the trims elsewhere are spread thinly enough that the plot does not read as abridged. Where the old film held a background in soft focus, the new one often resolves it; where the Academy frame cropped a set, outpainted material carries the image outward into the audience's peripheral vision, occasionally inventing figures and detail that were never photographed.

The sound was rebuilt from the ground up rather than upscaled. Herbert Stothart's Academy Award-winning 1939 arrangements were re-recorded by an 80-piece orchestra under David Newman's direction on the original scoring stage, replacing a mono optical track with something the venue's beamforming array can place precisely around the room. A soundtrack album followed on 7 November 2025, including an a cappella rendition. In the house, dialogue and effects sit where the picture puts them, which matters more than usual when the picture is 150 feet tall.

Judy Garland's performance survives all of this as the thing the production is organised around, and most accounts agree it is the strongest argument for the exercise. The weak link is motion: slower sequences hold up at close to crystalline sharpness, while the busiest shots show a slight smear as the processing works harder than the source material can support.

The argument that arrived with it

No part of the project drew more heat than the AI work. Before the premiere, critics argued that erasing film grain, sharpening deliberately soft backgrounds and generating characters to fill newly created screen space amounted to overwriting a finished film rather than restoring one. The reception after opening stayed split along those lines: admirers of the room's scale against detractors who found the retouched faces waxy and the movement robotic in close-up, a judgement that recurs across published reviews.

Within its own industry the craft was rewarded. The production took the Visual Effects Society Award for Outstanding Visual Effects in a Special Venue Project in 2026. The 4D additions have drawn their own sceptical coverage — Gizmodo greeted the September 2026 upgrade with the line that the show had somehow become more dystopian, and noted that animatronic winged monkeys over the seats are nightmare material for anyone who found the originals frightening as a child.

The practical point is that the controversy never touched demand. Both readings can be true at once: the processing is visible and sometimes unflattering, and the room still produces an effect no conventional cinema can.

The commercial record, milestone by milestone

The show opened on 28 August 2025 and crossed a million tickets and $130m in sales by 17 October that year, a figure that pushed Sphere Entertainment stock up 14.5% to $67.24. Two million tickets and more than $260m were announced on 20 January 2026. Three million and more than $400m followed on 16 June 2026. By 25 September 2026 the count stood above four million tickets and $500m in sales — a scale of take that no single Las Vegas production has matched in the format.

Those numbers have reshaped Sphere's programming. The venue has confirmed The Rocky Horror Picture Show as its next film project, given the same treatment and due in 2027, and Oz itself is being extended rather than wound down: tickets were on sale through the beginning of 2027 as of the September announcement, with the schedule since stretching deeper into that year and several hundred dated showings open at any one time.

The economics rest on turnover rather than event scarcity. Multiple showings run every day, most seats are priced above $100, and the production plays to a rolling tourist audience that largely does not return — the opposite model to a music residency, and the reason a 75-minute runtime matters commercially as well as artistically.

Inside the room in late 2026

There is no support act. The pre-show happens in Sphere's atrium, split between sepia Kansas and Emerald City green, with interactive holograms, themed food and merchandise before the doors open. The film then runs straight through for 75 minutes with no interval.

The 4D layer has grown twice. The opening configuration gave the tornado wind, fog, flying leaves and rumbling seats, butterflies in the early Oz scenes, foam apples thrown from the orchard, falling snow as the poppy spell breaks, pyrotechnics in the throne room and flying monkeys delivered by drones. On 25 September 2026, following an announcement on 31 August, Sphere replaced and expanded much of it: larger animatronic winged monkeys that cross the room above the audience, scene-specific scents piped house-wide, scented apples, additional pyrotechnic fireworks and a shower of what the venue calls Glinda Glitter. Jennifer Koester, Sphere's president and chief operating officer, framed the upgrade as taking the most memorable moments of the experience to the next level.

Reporting from the room since the upgrade has singled out the scents as the surprise: they register gradually rather than announcing themselves with theme-park bluntness. The tornado remains the sequence audiences talk about on the way out, and the floating head of Oz the one the screen size genuinely serves. Rob Kachelriess, reviewing for City Cast Las Vegas, recommended it as a mix of nostalgia, sentimentality and technology not available anywhere else, while flagging the motion blur and the price. The venue has also begun programming around the run: ticket holders over the weekend of 30 October to 1 November 2026 got trick-or-treat stations, a 3D haunted forest photo set and a commemorative treat bag in the atrium, with discounted child admission alongside full-price adult tickets, costumes encouraged and masks prohibited.