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AI enhances 'Wizard of Oz' for immersive Las Vegas Sphere

experience

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Project involves Warner Bros, Google, and over 2,000

collaborators

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Critics concerned about altering classic film, but

creators

defend innovation

By Dawn Chmielewski

LAS VEGAS, Aug 21 (Reuters) -

When "The Wizard of Oz at Sphere" opens off the Las Vegas

Strip on Aug. 28, audiences will experience the 1939 film

classic in a way its creators probably never thought possible.

Nearly 18,000 people will find themselves in the eye of the

swirling tornado that rips Dorothy's Kansas farmhouse off its

moorings and hurtles it ontoMunchkinland The film has

beenenhanced to fill a 160,000-square-foot wall of LED panels

that spansthreefootball fields, encircling the audience and

reaching 22 stories high, as 750-horsepower fans kick up wind

and debris to simulate the twister.

The$104 or more per seat spectacle is more than meets the

eye. "The Wizard of Oz" marks one of the most significant

partnerships between a studio and technology company to use

artificial intelligence to forge a new media experience.

Reuters spoke with nine people, including principals

directly involved in the project and senior entertainment

industry experts, who told the story behind a project that some

industry veterans see as a potential watershed moment in

Hollywood's use of AI tools

.

"It definitely represents a really meaningful milestone in

AI-human creative collaboration," said Thao Nguyen, immersive

arts and emerging technologies agent at CAA. "I think it will

set a precedent on how we reimagine culturally significant

media."

Bringing Dorothy and the Wicked Witch to the massive Sphere,

a globe-shaped entertainment venue featuring advanced

technology, took two years and brought together itscreative

team, Warner Bros Discovery ( WBD ) executives, Google's DeepMind

researchers, academics, visual effects artists -- more than

2,000 people, in all.

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.

'YOU'RE TOAST!'

Getting here took the blessing of Warner Bros Discovery ( WBD ) CEO

David Zaslav, his studio chiefs and lawyers who established

guidelines for using AI. "Wizard of Oz at Sphere" drew upon

archival materials from the film -- including set blueprints,

shot lists, publicity stills and film artifacts -- as well as

some 60 research papers to help deliver the movie in resolution

representing a ten-fold 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," said 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.'"

The project began in 2023 with Sphere executives 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 well-suited for the Sphere's enormous canvas, said

Carolyn Blackwood, head of Sphere Studios. It presented an

opportunity to re-introduce 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 of its time. While not the first movie to use

Technicolor, "The Wizard of Oz's" dramatic transition from sepia

tones to hyper-saturated color marked a cinematic milestone.

Sphere Entertainment's ( SPHR ) CEO James Dolan and creative

collaborator Jane Rosenthal, Tribeca Film Festival co-founder

and noted 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.

AI 'QUARANTINE ZONE'

Dolan approached Warner Bros Discovery ( WBD ) CEO Zaslav, a friend

and business partner from the early days of cable TV, to propose

bringing "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 It's an example of the great IP we own at Warner Bros."

Before turning over one of the world's most important

entertainment properties, 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 "Oz" 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," said Grossmann.

"Warner Brothers and Google and the Sphere created an

environment where they said, 'We don't necessarily know how it's

going to end, but we're going to create a little quarantine zone

here.'"

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, whose Los Angeles

studio, Magnopus, worked on such photo-realistic computer

animated films as Disney's "The Lion King."

AI enhanced the resolution of tiny celluloid frames from

1939 to ultra-high-definition images. It restored details --

like freckles on Dorothy's face or burlap texture on Scarecrow's

face -- obscured by Technicolor's process. AI 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

braintrust to elevate consumer-grade AI tools to deliver crisp

images with the Sphere's 16K "super" resolution.

Musiciansre-recorded the entire film scoreon 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.

FLYING MONKEYS

Despite 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 criticizing this have seen the film or

understand what we are doing," said Rosenthal.

In a private midnight screening for Reuters, Grossmann

offered a glimpse of what's to come.

Some changes are subtle, as when Uncle Henry stands by the

front door while neighbor Almira Gulch demands Toto. AI places

the performer, who spends much of his timeout of view, back into

frame, stitching together a wider view to fill the Sphere's

expansive viewing plane.

Other changes aim to realize the filmmakers' vision in ways

that weren't technically feasible 86 years ago As Dorothy and

friends the Wizard in the Emerald Throne Room, a 200-foot-high

green head looms over the audience, eyes bulging and voice

booming, creating amore imposing depiction than the original

image of an actor in green makeup projected on smoke.

"Whenever we made a change, it was because we wanted the

audience to experience what Dorothy was experiencing directly,"

said Grossmann. "We completed something filmmakers were

intending to do but were limited by 1939's tools .

Coordinated physical effects add another dimension. Flying

monkeys will swoop into the Sphere as 16-foot-long helium-filled

simians steered by drone operators, one of many Four-D effects.

The result is an amalgam of cinema, live production and

experiential VR. "I think that's going to change the way people

think about entertainment and experience," Grossmann said.

(Editing by Anna Driver and Ken Li)