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Reuters

In one dramatic scene of The Wizard of Oz at Sphere that just opened off the Las Vegas Strip, the audience finds themselves in the swirling tornado that rips Dorothy’s Kansas farmhouse off its moorings and hurtles it onto Munchkinland.
The 1939 screen classic has been enhanced to fill a 160,000 sq ft (14,860 square metre) wall of LED panels that spans three football fields, encircling the audience and reaching 22 storeys high, as 560 kilowatt fans kick up wind and debris to simulate the twister.
It is an experience its creators probably never thought was possible.
The Wizard of Oz at the Sphere marks one of the most significant partnerships between a studio and a technology company to forge a new media experience using AI.
“It definitely represents a really meaningful milestone in AI-human creative collaboration,” says Thao Nguyen, immersive arts and emerging technologies agent at Creative Artists Agency.
“I think it will set a precedent for how we reimagine culturally significant media.”


Bringing Dorothy and the Wicked Witch to the Sphere, a globe-shaped entertainment venue, 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 total.
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.
Getting here took the blessing of Warner Bros Discovery’s chief executive David Zaslav, his studio chiefs and lawyers who established guidelines for using AI.
The Wizard of Oz at Sphere drew upon archive materials from the 1939 film, including set blueprints, shot lists, publicity stills, film artefacts and some 60 research papers, to help deliver the film in a resolution representing a tenfold 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,” says 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.’”
In 2023, Sphere executives were 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 suited to the Sphere’s enormous canvas, says Carolyn Blackwood, head of Sphere Studios. It presented an opportunity to reintroduce 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 in its time. While not the first to use Technicolor, The Wizard of Oz’s dramatic transition from sepia tones to hypersaturated colours was a cinematic milestone.

Sphere Entertainment’s chief executive James Dolan, together with creative collaborator Jane Rosenthal, a co-founder of the Tribeca Film Festival and a film producer, envisioned a more ambitious project than a mere digital remastering of a classic. Rosenthal tapped Hays to bring in Google as a technical partner.
Dolan approached Zaslav, a friend and business partner from the early days of cable TV, to propose bringing The Wizard of Oz to the Sphere.
“I had just been to the Sphere with a friend and was really blown away,” said Zaslav, adding that Dolan and Rosenthal also won over his studio chiefs, who loved the idea.
Warner Bros set strict ground rules. Google could train its generative AI models on each major actor to reproduce their performances, but the data would remain the studio’s property. None of the training data would be incorporated into Google’s public AI models.
“One of the things critical to getting this project started was creating a safe place for experimentation,” says Grossmann.
The visual effects team initially tried enlarging images using CGI, which would have created photorealistic animated versions of the characters. That approach was rejected because it would violate the integrity of the original performances.
“AI was effectively a last resort, because we couldn’t really do it any other way,” said Grossmann.

AI enhanced the resolution of tiny celluloid frames from 1939 to ultra-high-definition images. It restored details – freckles on Dorothy’s face and the burlap texture on the Scarecrow’s face – that were previously obscured.
It also helped “outpaint” on-screen images to fill gaps created by camera cuts or framing, as when it took a close-up of the Tin Man chopping a door of the Witch’s castle with an axe to free Dorothy and completed the image of the woodman.
It took months of repeated fine-tuning and Google’s DeepMind to elevate consumer-grade AI tools to deliver crisp images with the Sphere’s 16K “super” resolution.
Musicians re-recorded the film score on the original sound stage to take advantage of the venue’s 167,000 speakers. The vocal performances of Judy Garland and other actors remain unaltered.
Despite the attention to authenticity, the project has attracted criticism from some cinephiles who object to altering the cherished film. Entertainment writer Joshua Rivera called it “an affront to art and nature”.
“None of these people criticising this have seen the film or understand what we are doing,” says Rosenthal.
Grossman explains that whenever the creative team made a change, it was because they wanted the audience to experience what Dorothy was experiencing directly.
“We completed something filmmakers were intending to do but were limited by 1939’s tools .”
Coordinated physical effects add another dimension. Flying monkeys swoop into the Sphere as 16-foot (4.9-metre) helium-filled simians steered by drone operators.
The result is an amalgam of cinema, live production and experiential virtual reality.
“I think that’s going to change the way people think about entertainment and experience,” Grossmann says.


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American cinema

How Google AI helped bring 1939 classic The Wizard of Oz into the 21st century

A display of 50-feet-long legs and 22-feet-tall ruby slippers, a promotion for the upcoming “Wizard of Oz at Sphere” movie, in Las Vegas, Nevada, U.S., August 20, 2025.  REUTERS/Steve Marcus

An animation featuring the Wicked Witch of the West is displayed on the Sphere, in Las Vegas, Nevada. Photo: Reuters

Oscar-winning visual effects artist Ben Grossmann spent three years working with Google’s AI and Hollywood experts to expand the original The Wizard of Oz film to fill the Sphere in Las Vegas. Photo: Reuters

Giant ruby slippers and legs are displayed outside the Sphere, part of the promotion for The Wizard of Oz at Sphere. Photo: Reuters

“We completed something filmmakers were intending to do but were limited by 1939’s tools ,” says Oscar-winning visual effects artist Ben Grossmann. Photo: Reuters

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Synchronous speaker Bettina Zech works in a dubbing studio in Germany in 2025. Photo: Reuters

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Lifestyle

Entertainment

Las Vegas’ The Wizard of Oz at Sphere is an immersive, ultra-enhanced version of the original that involved over 2,000 people


Las Vegas’ The Wizard of Oz at Sphere is an immersive, ultra-enhanced version of the original that involved over 2,000 people.


World of performing arts

Artificial intelligence

ChatGPT and other generative AIs

Google DeepMind

How Google AI helped bring 1939 classic The Wizard of Oz into the 21st century

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}Las Vegas’ The Wizard of Oz at Sphere is an immersive, ultra-enhanced version of the original that involved over 2,000 people

Las Vegas’ The Wizard of Oz at Sphere is an immersive, ultra-enhanced version of the original that involved over 2,000 people