AI-Enabled 'Wizard Of Oz' Clicks Its Heels At Sphere In Las Vegas

For the AI advocates behind a new version of The Wizard of Oz at the Sphere in Las Vegas, the 1939 musical offered a viable way to test of how technology could transform a classic.

The film, which the Library of Congress says is the most-viewed in history, is considered to be part of the Hollywood firmament, a nearly 90-year ode to the enduring power of the medium. That helps explain why some critics and cinephiles already have been registering dismay about the update.

At the same time, it is also a film that most people have never seen on the big screen. A troubled production that was a misfire at the box office in its initial run, it found new life decades later when shown on television.

“It felt like it was ripe for the Sphere,” said producer Jane Rosenthal, a member of the new Oz creative team. “There were five different directors on it. It came from the old studio system,” rather than the auteur framework that came along later, she added. Moreover, it always had technology at heart, Rosenthal told Deadline in an interview. Producer Mervyn LeRoy and other stakeholders “pushed for Technicolor, and it was one of the first time it was used in a film.”

If your frame of reference for these kinds of modernization efforts is the brightening of faded-out colors and a remastered soundtrack, however, think again. The Sphere is a completely different environment than a traditional movie theater, with a seating capacity of more than 18,000 and a curving, 160,000-square-foot wall of LED panels the length of three football fields and 22 stories high.

More than merely enhancing the traditional movie theater presentation, the new Oz is looking to create a true spectacle. Imagine 750-horsepower wind machines kicking up debris and haptic signals vibrating the seats as the iconic twister lifts Dorothy’s house and deposits it next to the yellow-brick road. In this Oz, the flying monkeys actually take flight.

The elements contained in the traditional frame also had to get a complete rethink, lest audiences feel like they are looking through a mail slot at the Scarecrow and the Tin Man. That meant – and here comes the controversial part – AI models trained on archival source materials generated “performances” by various characters who did not make the original cut. The 16K resolution in the Sphere is higher than on any screen on Earth, meaning textures and faces needed to be rendered frame by frame for the space. The sound, too, was redone for the venue’s 167,000 speakers.

“What we’re doing is not a Scorsese restoration,” Rosenthal said. “What we’re doing, along with our partners at Warner Bros and Google, is an experiential version.”

With ticket prices starting north of $100, the Wizard of Oz run through the fall is not just another release in a slate, though it could be followed by other new takes on library titles. Carolyn Blackwood, the former longtime Warners exec who know runs Sphere Studios, said the company overseen by James Dolan — owner of New York’s Knicks and Rangers, plus Madison Square Garden — is actively considering follow-ups.

“Not every movie ever made would be appropriate” given the sensory aspect of the Sphere, she said, but Oz “opens a door” of possibilities. “That’s what we’re talking about and exploring now. We’re learning all the time, and that’s what’s been so exciting. It’s an immersive medium, it’s not a passive medium.”

Ben Grossmann, an Oscar-winning visual effects artists recruited to spearhead the visuals, noted that one key aspect of the new version is that it’s closer to a “live show” than a traditional film. Picture, he said, is never truly locked.

“Movies are so old that you think of them as a serial process,” he said. “But we think of this more like software, where we put it out and then we can do updates and make adjustments after we see what the audience wants and make adjustments.”

In that sense, he added, it’s “more of a living thing that you’re creating instead of something you put out, ship and never think of again. The mindset that the tech-Hollywood team was on an “R&D” project “helped us accomplish this,” Grossmann added. “We had to stay agile and put technology in the hands of the artists and make creative decisions.”

Early images of the reworked Oz have gone over poorly with some denizens of the social realm once known as Film Twitter. After film historian and TCM host Ben Mankiewicz tweeted a clip of the tornado scene (gathered when he was working on a CBS Sunday Morning segment), the backlash was fierce. The anxiety and dread about AI potentially displacing many Hollywood workers found a new vehicle in the overhaul of a pop culture texts considered sacred. “If a living director wants to play in this new realm, I’m all for it,” filmmaker Patrick Read Johnson posted on X. “If it’s just a rights holder looking to expand their profits without any consult by the artists who actually made the film. No.”

Rosenthal dismisses the raspberries as “the blind leading the blind” given that no test screenings or previews have been held and there is no way to leak the site-specific experience. After all, the Vegas location remains the only existing Sphere, though Dolan hopes to expand if demand continues for the roster of concerts put on there by the likes of U2, the Eagles and Backstreet Boys.

Grossmann said he understands the frustration in some corners of the creative community given the sudden primacy of AI in general and the fear that an already cost-conscious entertainment industry will look to use it to cut jobs. “We’re doing this project on a canvas of societal change that makes people uncomfortable,” he acknowledged.

And yet, he argued, the new Wizard of Oz should not be considered to be a film project. It occupies a new space, and its proponents hope it can galvanize interest in theatrical moviegoing, even if by proxy.

“Sphere is a reality that makes the screen disappear,” Grossmann said. “When you’re producing here, you have to unlearn cinema and you have to relearn the human experience.”

AI-Enabled ‘Wizard Of Oz’ Clicks Its Heels At Sphere In Las Vegas

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