Latest news with #thesphere.com
Yahoo
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
…More Than You Can Imagine: The Wizard of Oz at Sphere Tickets on Sale Now at thesphere.com
Sphere Unveils Outdoor Activation Featuring The Wicked Witch Of The East's Legs and Her 22-Foot-Tall Ruby Slippers LAS VEGAS, June 10, 2025--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Sphere Entertainment Co. (NYSE: SPHR) announced today that tickets are now on sale for The Wizard of Oz at Sphere, a fully immersive experience that will make you feel like you have stepped inside The Wizard of Oz through the use of all of Sphere's technologies. Presented in collaboration with Warner Bros. Discovery, Google, and Magnopus, The Wizard of Oz at Sphere will open at Sphere in Las Vegas on August 28 as part of The Sphere Experience, Sphere's signature content category. Tickets are on sale now at The Wizard of Oz at Sphere will transport audiences, making them feel like they are traveling down the yellow brick road alongside Dorothy and her friends on an adventure in Oz to get to the Emerald City. The original film, shot for a 4:3 movie screen in the 1930s, will now fill Sphere's 160,000 sq. ft. interior display plane, which wraps up, over and around the audience to create a fully immersive visual environment. The Wizard of Oz at Sphere will utilize the venue's haptic seats, environmental effects and custom scents to make you feel like you are part of the movie and have landed in Kansas and Oz. The film's original songs have also been remastered and their orchestrations re-recorded to take on new clarity via Sphere Immersive Sound's 167,000 speakers. In a celebration that matches the size and scale of The Wizard of Oz at Sphere, Sphere today unveiled an installation where the venue has landed on the Wicked Witch of the East. Her 50-foot-long legs, complete with 22-foot-tall ruby slippers, are complemented by a display on the venue's Exosphere featuring the scene where Dorothy's farmhouse falls out of a twister and onto the witch. The legs are on view to the general public outside Sphere now, with daily times listed on Jim Dolan, Executive Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Sphere Entertainment said, "If you've ever wondered if Oz actually exists – it does inside Sphere. The Wizard of Oz at Sphere will put on full display what Sphere is capable of as an experiential medium. Audiences will feel like they are part of the adventure as they experience the film in a way they never have before." Warner Bros. Motion Picture Group's Michael De Luca and Pam Abdy said, "The Wizard of Oz remains one of the most beloved movies in cinema, with countless generations continuing to discover the film since its debut more than eight decades ago. A technical marvel of its time, the film pushed the boundaries of filmmaking to bring audiences an experience unlike anything they had seen before. With The Wizard of Oz at Sphere, audiences will have the chance to see the film adapted into an entirely new and groundbreaking medium that celebrates the wonder and glory of its Technicolor roots. Ben Grossmann, CEO of Magnopus said, "Our guiding principle in The Wizard of Oz at Sphere is not just to leave the audience with a sense of wonder and delight from meeting the characters in a new way, but to leave them with the feeling that they were there with them. This project brings together some of the greatest film historians, artists, and technologists to do what's never been possible before, putting the audience inside the world of the film and giving them a whole new level of experience and adventure." Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google Cloud said, "The Wizard of Oz at Sphere is a first-of-its-kind experience, that Google's cutting-edge technologies is helping make possible. Sphere is pushing the boundaries and providing a new generation of audiences with an exciting way to experience a classic film and a treasured piece of American history." To create this experience, Sphere Studios, the immersive content studio dedicated to developing experiences for Sphere, built a team of over a thousand artists, technologists and researchers to leverage Sphere's technologies. Using the film and key pieces of source material, including schematics, set plans and scores, the approximately 75-minute film experience will maintain the integrity of the original while bringing it to life in an immersive environment – creating an opportunity for fans of all ages to form new connections with The Wizard of Oz. The creative team includes Academy Award and Emmy-nominated producer Jane Rosenthal (The Irishman); Academy Award-winning visual effects specialist Ben Grossmann (Hugo); Academy Award-winning editor Jennifer Lame (Oppenheimer); and Creative Director Zack Winokur (Little Island). The Wizard of Oz at Sphere opens August 28, 2025, with multiple showtimes daily. Tickets start at $104 and are on sale now at For groups of nine or more, please contact 725-258-7775 or groups@ For suites, please contact 725-258-6743 or suites@ Hotel packages are available for a limited time exclusively through The Venetian Resort Las Vegas, the resort connected to Sphere. For more information, visit or call 866-682-6155. For press assets, please click here. About Sphere Sphere is a next-generation entertainment medium that is redefining the future of live entertainment. A venue where the foremost artists, creators, and technologists create extraordinary experiences that take storytelling to a new level and transport audiences to places both real and imagined. The venue hosts original Sphere Experiences from leading Hollywood directors; concerts and residencies from the world's biggest artists; and premier marquee events. The first Sphere venue opened in Las Vegas in September 2023, and is a new Las Vegas landmark, powered by cutting-edge technologies that ignite the senses and enable audiences to share experiences at a never-before-seen scale. More information is available at View source version on Contacts Sphere Entertainment – spherepr@
USA Today
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- USA Today
Inside the Las Vegas Sphere's plans to enhance 'The Wizard of Oz' using AI
NEW YORK − The yellow brick road is about to get colossal when it winds through the Las Vegas Sphere. Between the venue's 160,000-square-foot screen display that anchors the visual environment and remastered songs that will play through 167,000 speakers from Sphere Immersive Sound, the enhanced version of 'The Wizard of Oz' will definitely not be in Kansas anymore when it arrives Aug. 28. The intent, says Jennifer Koester, president and COO of the Sphere, is to answer the question, 'What would it feel like to be in Oz?' Through the venue's haptic seats, viewers will feel the swirls of the tornado that whisk Dorothy's house to Munchkinland, smell the poppies as they envelop the room in 16K x 16K LED screen resolution, tremble a little with the Cowardly Lion and maybe make those flying monkeys feel exceptionally realistic. Tickets to the immersive version of "The Wizard of Oz" are on sale now at The film will be shown multiple times daily for an open-ended run. Need a break? Play the USA TODAY Daily Crossword Puzzle. The ambitious amplification of the iconic movie is possible through a marriage between artificial intelligence and film archives from Warner Bros. and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. The dual components allowed creators 'to make things that weren't possible, possible,' Koester says in a sitdown with USA TODAY, while still maintaining the integrity of the original film. Koester uses the example of Dorothy's limbs, which, when filmed for a 4:3 aspect ratio on a standard-size movie screen in 1939, didn't always include full images. 'The original film was shot so you have a picture of Dorothy, but you don't see her hands, you don't see her legs. When you think about (the size of) the (Sphere) screen, you know her hands and legs were there and we want to show them,' Koester says. Working with additional footage that never made it into the film and set designs for the film, 'we trained (AI) models on all of that original footage. So now we can create an arm for Dorothy or fill in her legs from that AI model.' In addition to the visuals, the original songs from the film including treasured favorites 'We're Off to See the Wizard,' 'Ding-Dong! The Witch Is Dead' and Judy Garland's timeless 'Over the Rainbow,' have been remastered and their orchestrations rerecorded. Koester says an 80-piece orchestra was brought to the original MGM scoring stage near Los Angeles to redo the entire soundtrack, which, when combined with the Sphere's haptics, will augment the immersive experience. 'Imagine the feeling you can evoke because you're coming down the yellow brick road into the spooky forest,' Koester says. 'And to your left you're hearing spooky sounds and then maybe some of the flying monkeys on your right. It's the evocation of feeling that becomes so possible because of the technology that exists in that venue.' The all-encompassing experience will carry a ticket price of $104, which aligns with the current Sphere films 'Postcard from Earth' from filmmaker Darren Aronofsky and 'V-U2,' the startlingly lifelike concert film taken from U2's Sphere-opening residency. As with all things related to the venue, it isn't about the experience you think you know, it's about the unexpected. Koester hints that the immersions will begin as soon as you enter the Sphere and walk into its cavernous atrium that will 'transform you into the world of Kansas" and later, "when you exit the (seats) and you've been through Oz, there's going to be some really innovative and interactive activations.' The venue is promoting its Sphere-icized 'Wizard of Oz' with an outdoor installation suggesting that the venue has landed atop the Wicked Witch of the East, complete with her 50-foot-long legs and 22-foot-tall ruby slippers extended onto the ground. The legs will be on view all the time, but daily photo opportunities on the Sphere campus are subject to times listed at 'It's larger than life,' Koester says, 'and just a hint to what's about to happen inside.'
