Last week, I trudged through the Strip’s endless construction and a labyrinthine parking lot to have my first experience of Sphere. Sphere—just Sphere, no definite article—is owned by Sphere Entertainment, a holding company of the Dolan family (see: HBO, AMC, Radio City Music Hall, MSG Sports), which used to be called Madison Square Garden Entertainment, which itself was spun off from the Madison Square Garden Company. Sphere has been open since September 2023 but even as a local I’ve avoided it because, even by the standards of 21st-century Vegas it looks and sounds stupid. Everyone has their limit. I pushed past mine because I had heard about the supposed revival of one of American cinema’s seminal achievements, The Wizard of Oz. A team of engineers and digital artists, gathered at the behest of Sphere’s owners, have spent two years working on a new version that can fit on Sphere’s 160,000 square foot LED display, the largest in the world.
This presents an immediate problem. Projecting a film from 1939 shot with cameras that produce a rectangular image would leave massive sections of black nothingness, precious dead space, all those millions and millions of diodes left unused. To remedy this, the Sphere team digitally extended sets, marshalled AI to scale up the image resolution, as well as generate more background extras, cut half an hour from the original runtime, and threw in 4D bells and whistles to turn The Wizard of Oz into, in effect, a shitty, high-tech rollercoaster.
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