The Sphere venue in Las Vegas will deploy its “Sphere Immersive Sound” system, which is designed and built by HOLOPLOT, to power a fully immersive performance of The Wizard of Oz.
Presented in collaboration with Warner Bros., Discovery, Google, and Magnopus, The Wizard of Oz at Sphere will open in Las Vegas on August 28 as part of The Sphere Experience, the venue’s signature content category.
The original film, shot for a 4:3 movie screen in the 1930s, will now fill Sphere’s 160,000sqft 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 utilise the venue’s haptic seats, environmental effects and custom scents to make audiences feel like they 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 the world’s largest concert-grade audio system, which has about 1,600 permanently installed and 300 movable Holoplot X1 matrix-array loudspeaker modules and comprises a total of 167,000 individually amplified speaker drivers.
To create this experience, Sphere Studios 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.
The creative team includes Oscar and Emmy-nominated producer Jane Rosenthal (The Irishman); Oscar-winning visual effects specialist Ben Grossmann (Hugo); Oscar-winning editor Jennifer Lame (Oppenheimer); and creative director Zack Winokur (Little Island).
Sphere also unveiled an installation where the venue has landed on the Wicked Witch of the East. Her 50ft-long legs, complete with 22ft-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.
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.”
The Wizard of Oz at Sphere opens August 28, 2025, with multiple showtimes daily. Tickets start at $104 and are on sale now here.
