Sphere’s ‘The Wizard of Oz’ Walks an Uneasy Line Between Cinematic Enchantment and A.I. Slop

Anyone unimpressed with Glinda’s newly gifted vehicular spherical globe in Wicked: For Good might follow the Yellow Brick Road to Las Vegas and its own magic bubble. James Dolan’s Sphere, known mainly for hosting live concerts, is currently the home of a wildly distended, dazzlingly supersized and grotesquely manipulated version of 1939’s classic film The Wizard of Oz.

All the action unfolds on a 160,000-square-foot LED screen with 16K resolution, dominating its viewers with an image over 300 feet high. (IMAX, eat your heart out.) Capacity for the event is 10,000 for each screening, and audiences have been coming in droves since it opened on August 28. The initial run-through, scheduled to end on March 31, has now been extended through May.

Not quite the cinematic reinterpretation that the pair of Wicked films offer, this newly bedazzled curio—known formally as The Wizard of Oz at Sphere and presented in 4D—is, in its own way, just as subversive, if not downright corny. Brace for a teeth-rattling tornado sequence with actual wind machines blowing debris all around while your haptic seat shakes and quivers! Dodge the Styrofoam apples that fall from the ceiling when the sentient trees throw their fruit at Dorothy! Feel the Great and Powerful Oz thunder his declarations while white flashes and bursts of flames pop around the venue’s perimeter! And are those mannequin-sized drones buzzing overhead doubling as flying monkeys?

The butchery is undeniable: This Sphere-ified Oz is 75 minutes long, nearly 30 minutes shorter than the beloved classic. Hope you’re not a big fan of the Cowardly Lion, because his song about being the King of the Forest is totally gone. Other nips and tucks include less time with the villainous Almira Gulch, a truncated visit to Professor Marvel, shortened conversations with Glinda the Good, a condensed version of “Ding-Dong the Witch is Dead,” plus abbreviated introductions to the Scarecrow, the Tin Man and the Cowardly Lion.

But there’s more than enough spectacle to impress. The film is literally expanded in all directions, giving a truly immersive dimension to Hollywood’s adaptation of Frank L. Baum’s fairy tale. You think the Tin Man gets buffed and shined in the Emerald City? This Oz is digitally zhuzhed and A.I.-enhanced beyond belief, with beautifully crisp landscapes and buildings that feel uncannily real.

Sepia-toned Kansas is even more starkly handsome, with razor-sharp bales of hay, lifelike barnyard chickens and cows and an expansive copper sky overhead. When Dorothy sings about happy little bluebirds in “Over the Rainbow,” one of those chirping warblers is now soaring above to match her upward gaze.

And when that twister uses its gale-force winds to lift up Dorothy’s house, we’re no longer on the inside looking out; now we’re in the eye of the storm, watching not only the house fly by but also swirling bovines, airborne men in a rowboat and—in an extended version of the iconic sequence—a bicycling Ms. Gulch transformed into the broomstick-riding Wicked Witch of the West. (Look straight up at Sphere’s domed ceiling, by the way, and you can see right out of the tornado’s cylindrical form and notice a perfectly calm circle of sky.)

One set piece after another amazes. The Yellow Brick Road looks newly-paved in its bright canary hue; the merry old Land of Oz has vast rolling hills and picture-perfect mountains; candy-colored Munchkinland is an absolutely vibrant village; the Haunted Forest has a vividly menacing darkness; And the Emerald City, with extended towers and ornately expanded walls, shimmers in all its Art Deco glory. The Wizard’s vast, dark green Chamber now has a skylight; the Wicked Witch’s castle looms with extra wickedness. And the ruby slippers shine with vibrant intensity. The glammed-up production design is absolutely astounding.

There’s only one problem, and it’s a big one: the cast. No amount of digital wizardry (yet) can convincingly re-render actual 1939-era actors into a 2025 production. You can only upconvert the visual resolution of the film’s characters so much—completely wiping away the film grain eliminates skin pores, leaving faces eerily smooth and plastic.

Dorothy and her trio look like they’ve been peeled off the impeccably revivified Yellow Brick Road and then placed back, like sticker-book figurines. There’s a loss of gravity to their movements. At times, they even seem to be floating. Toto, too, with his shock of matted fur, seems digitally fuzzy. And other people have garish enhancements: the Wicked Witch suddenly has a hugely prominent black hair growing out of the mole on her green chin.

Even worse are the background actors. The main reason why so many scenes were trimmed and cut from the original film wasn’t necessarily to tighten up the running time; it was also to cannibalize the Extras and reinsert them on the left and right sides of the newly extended, digitally enhanced scenery.

So Munchkinland now has crowds of people standing behind Dorothy, in an A.I.-sweetened loop where they rock back and forth, waving their arms or shifting their weight endlessly in a computer-generated spell that prolongs their screen time. Some of the Extras’ faces look smeared and oddly deformed, due to those same A.I. enhancements. More than a few times, they even stare, with dead-eyed smiles, straight into the camera. It’s deeply unsettling and more than a little distracting.

Intriguingly, many scenes have less editing in them: instead of cutting between the Tin Man’s solo dance and a shot of Dorothy and the Scarecrow watching him, for example, all three of them now share the same enormous frame—the Tin Man in the middle, Dorothy and the Scarecrow on the right. Thanks again to A.I., the Tin Man’s entire dance routine is seamless. But now Dorothy and the Scarecrow’s sight lines don’t match. Dorothy actually looks a bit bored, and seems to be staring off into the distance.

Worst of all is how A.I. has compromised the film’s emotionally poignant climax. In the original film, when Dorothy says goodbye to her companions, the camera fills the frame with them one at a time for each tender farewell. At Sphere, all three stand in a row, waiting for Dorothy to talk to them. Weirdly, each one is slightly out of focus—and each only comes into focus once Dorothy starts to talk to them. When she stops talking to them, they stop emoting and go back out of focus. Then, like the Extras, each one goes into a powered-down mode, shifting back and forth as though in a trance.

As an example of cutting-edge technology used to turn a national cultural treasure into a gloriously kinetic thrill ride, The Wizard of Oz at Sphere is certainly great and powerful. As a tool for enhancing the power of human connection through storytelling, it needs to keep waving its magic wands. We’re definitely not in Kansas anymore, but we still have a long way to go before we get to Oz.