By Dawn Chmielewski
LAS VEGAS — When “The Wizard of Oz at Sphere” opens off the Las Vegas Strip on Aug. 28, audiences will experience the 1939 film classic in a way its creators probably never thought possible.
Thousands of people will find themselves in the eye of the swirling tornado that rips Dorothy’s Kansas farmhouse off its moorings and hurtles it onto Munchkinland. The film has been enhanced to fill a 160,000-square-foot wall of LED panels that spans three football fields, encircling the audience and reaching 22 stories high, as 750-horsepower fans kick up wind and debris to simulate the twister.
The $104 or more per seat spectacle is more than meets the eye. “The Wizard of Oz” marks one of the most significant partnerships between a studio and technology company to use artificial intelligence to forge a new media experience.
Reuters spoke with nine people, including principals directly involved in the project and senior entertainment industry experts, who told the story behind a project that some industry veterans see as a potential watershed moment in Hollywood’s use of AI tools.
“It definitely represents a really meaningful milestone in AI-human creative collaboration,” said Thao Nguyen, immersive arts and emerging technologies agent at CAA. “I think it will set a precedent on how we reimagine culturally significant media.”
Bringing Dorothy and the Wicked Witch to the massive Sphere, a globe-shaped entertainment venue featuring advanced technology, took two years and brought together its creative team, Warner Bros Discovery executives, Google’s DeepMind researchers, academics, visual effects artists — more than 2,000 people, in all.
The development occurred during intense apprehension over AI’s impact on jobs in Hollywood and the desire to preserve human creativity. Some visual effects companies initially contacted to work on the project declined because they were not permitted to work with AI at the time.
‘You’re toast’
Getting here took the blessing of Warner Bros Discovery CEO David Zaslav, his studio chiefs and lawyers who established guidelines for using AI. “Wizard of Oz at Sphere” drew upon archival materials from the film — including set blueprints, shot lists, publicity stills and film artifacts — as well as some 60 research papers to help deliver the movie in resolution representing a ten-fold improvement over previous work.
“We had to reimagine the cinematography, we had to reimagine the editing, and we had to do all of this without changing the experience,” said Oscar-winner Ben Grossmann, who oversaw the project’s visual effects. “Because if you touch anything about this sacred piece of cinema, you’re toast!”
Rather than exploiting AI to cut jobs, they sought to use it to breathe fresh life into a classic story and create new experiences with existing intellectual property.
“Hollywood embraces new technology, and everyone can’t wait to be the second one to use it,” said Buzz Hays, a veteran film producer who leads Google Cloud’s entertainment industry solutions group. “What ‘The Wizard of Oz’ is doing for us is giving that first opportunity where people go, ‘Oh my god, this is not at all what I thought AI was going to be.’”
The project began in 2023 with Sphere executives discussing which project would push the technological boundaries of the venue that had already hosted U2 and Darren Aronofsky’s “Postcard from Earth.”
“The Wizard of Oz” quickly topped the list as a familiar, beloved film well-suited for the Sphere’s enormous canvas, said Carolyn Blackwood, head of Sphere Studios. It presented an opportunity to re-introduce the classic to a new generation in a way that would place them inside L. Frank Baum’s world.
Symbolically, the team chose a classic film that was a technical marvel of its time. While not the first movie to use Technicolor, “The Wizard of Oz’s” dramatic transition from sepia tones to hyper-saturated color marked a cinematic milestone. — Reuters
