There’s no place like Sphere.
A hotly anticipated Las Vegas Sphere residency for “The Wizard of Oz” kicks off Thursday, Aug. 28 — putting the beloved 1939 Hollywood classic not just back on the big screen, but at the highest resolution screen in the world, stretching 160,000 square feet.
Featuring seats that move with the action and sound blasted out of 1,568 crystal-clear speakers, it’s a setup that would likely wow even the wonderful Wizard himself.
“It’s an experience,” Madison Square Garden CEO James Dolan told The Post.
The man who famously sketched the initial design of the Sphere in a notebook before turning it into one of the most talked-about entertainment venues on Earth, Dolan’s $2.3 million passion project turns the timeworn story of Dorothy and her eclectic gang of pals into a futuristic feast for the senses.
“We engage in everything but taste and smell,” said Dolan, whose team of experts has been tapping their ruby slippers together for countless hours to construct the immersive, $104-and-up per ticket “experience” that’s designed to transport viewers into the movie itself — sparing no expense along the way.
“You’ll feel the wind from the tornado,” Dolan said of actual gusts and fog that envelops the space at one point, powered by 12-foot-tall fans with 750 horsepower each.
“And when the ground shakes, that’s programmed into your chair as well,” he said of the auditorium’s 10,000 haptics-enabled seats in the massive venue, which soars 366 feet high.
“There are some parts that will blow your mind.”
Following the ‘Yellow Brick Road’ to Sin City
“Getting the rights was the easy part,” said producer Jane Rosenthal, who initially suggested “Wizard” to Dolan as an exciting follow-up to buzzy residencies by U2 and the Backstreet Boys — which have been supplemented with original filmed shorts like director Darren Aronofsky’s immersive “Postcard from Earth.”
Rosenthal thought the cinema classic would lend itself well to the Sphere, following in the film’s footsteps of breaking special-effects ground.
Dolan recruited Oscar-winning visual-effects supervisor Ben Grossman, tasking him with the monumental job of inventing new ways to up the theatrical ante.
But transforming the nearly century-old movie into a cutting-edge, all-encompassing experience, including actual fire and literal flying monkeys, was as fraught as a trip to Oz.
“It’s rare you start a project knowing it might not be possible to finish,” Grossman told The Post. “You always keep pushing until there’s either nothing left to push for, or nothing left to push with.
“The way Jim (Dolan) runs the Sphere, nobody gets to a comfortable place and then stops,” he said.
Cue those flying monkeys
At one point, the project nearly hit the yellow brick wall — and was about to be abandoned.
After extensive work with a prototype, the team was able to showcase the result at the Sphere for the first time — it didn’t go well at all, Grossman admitted.
“We were feeling really good about ourselves, because we’re classic Hollywood cinema professionals,” he joked, revealing the horrifying moment when they viewed the original film, shot with a limiting, 1.37:1 aspect ratio, on a screen that nobody could have even dreamed of ever existing back in 1939.
“It felt like a Saturday morning cartoon — we got the wind knocked out of us,” Grossman recalled, saying the crew was left all but in tears.
But like a burst of wisdom from Auntie Em herself, a participating tech whiz on loan from Google DeepMind had a sudden brainwave.
“He said, ‘I combined this approach and this approach, and I came up with this new thing, and you can tell me if it’s good.’ We were, like, ‘Holy crap — that’s exactly what we’ve been trying to do!’”
The result uses AI “outpainting” to expand on scenes — thus filling out the massive screen.
That constant tweaking has continued right up to its premiere.
“We’re still working on it,” Dolan told The Post at press time.
‘The dreams you dare to dream really do come true’
While the team may have set out to reinvent the theatrical experience, they were simultaneously resolute about staying true to the 85-year-old source material.
“Everything was made with loving, deep care and attention,” said Rosenthal, whose team dove into the Warner Bros. archives to figure out the original wishes of the late Victor Fleming, who directed most of the film before taking over production on another Hollywood classic, “Gone with the Wind.”
“We’ve taken a lot of the intent of what they had wanted to do and added that to the picture,” Rosenthal explained, noting they painstakingly sifted through the original shot lists, prop lists and scripts of what the ’30s-era filmmakers intended to capture but either ran out of time, or didn’t have the budget or technological means to achieve.
Dolan said his favorite restored moment occurs in the skies, high above the Emerald City.
“The Wicked Witch of the West is skywriting and [it normally] says ‘Surrender Dorothy,’ but in the original cut, it said ‘Surrender Dorothy Or Die,’” which was apparently too dark for pre-war audiences.
“So we put the ‘Or Die’ back in,” he revealed.
The venue’s immersive sound system also allows audiences to hear more dialogue and environmental sounds that were lost, Dolan promised — also noting that the film’s sweeping, iconic score, for which composer Herbert Stothart won an Academy Award, has been refreshed.
“We split the vocals and rerecorded the music with an orchestra in the original MGM studios, where the original score was recorded,” said Rosenthal.
“The first time we heard it, I just started to cry. It’s so emotional, and it’s so gorgeous.”
Discourse in Munchkinland
With 120,000 tickets sold as the highly-anticipated Vegas premiere draws near — replete with Oz-ian guests like Lorna Luft, daughter of Judy Garland, who played Dorothy in the movie — the team finds themselves with one last obstacle to overcome.
After an early glimpse was teased by “CBS Sunday Morning” earlier this summer, critics were quick to call it “absolutely terrible” — even labeling it “radically mutilated” by the use of AI.
“I read all of the negative comments, and I think some people would get depressed or demoralized from it, but I actually just think it’s funny,” Grossman told The Post. “You’re watching people talk about something that they haven’t seen. Ninety percent of the stuff that they say is just made up and not true.”
When it comes to criticism of the sky, for example, “All of the skies are real,” Grossman says. “We photographed them with the world’s highest resolution camera, shooting in Kansas to capture the kind of skies that form before and after a tornado.”
Adds Grossman: “We never touched any of the things you’re complaining about. I’ve heard, ‘I can’t believe they changed the design of the Wizard’s head!’ But that’s the design of the Wizard’s head from the original movie, from production sketches.”
When it comes to criticism that its original 102-minute runtime has been pared down to 75 minutes, Dolan said, “The original kind of dwelled on a few things that were somewhat superfluous,” without giving specifics.
“Everything you love about the movie, I guarantee, is in the movie,” he said.
What’s next for The Sphere?
Amid recent chatter that Taylor Swift, whose aptly-titled, highly anticipated new album “Life of a Showgirl” drops Oct. 3, could be the Sphere’s next occupant — which reps reportedly deny — Dolan says they’re booked up until September 2027.
Aside from “Oz,” the current Backstreet Boys run will be followed up by the Zac Brown Band in December.
That month, the draw for the 2026 FIFA World Cup will also take place at the Sphere.
Next year will see the premiere of “From the Edge,” an extreme sports film, with Dolan saying it’ll be composed of “experiences like riding down an 80-foot wave.”
Meanwhile, a replica of the Vegas Sphere is being built in Abu Dhabi — the first of a planned network.
“I’m also hoping by the end of the year to have something to announce about where the first smaller Sphere goes, probably somewhere in the United States,” Dolan teased to The Post.
‘ The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties ’
‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source celebrity.land ’
