Audiences will be engulfed by the Kansas tornado that whisks Dorothy’s farmhouse into Oz, as the film is projected across a 160,000-square-foot LED wall—spanning the equivalent of three football fields and rising 22 stories high. To complete the illusion, industrial fans churn up wind and debris, while drones steer 16-foot helium-filled flying monkeys above the crowd.
But behind the spectacle lies something more profound: one of the entertainment industry’s boldest experiments in AI-human collaboration. Developed over two years by Warner Bros Discovery, Sphere Entertainment, Google DeepMind, and a global team of more than 2,000 artists and technologists, the project represents what some industry experts describe as a potential watershed in Hollywood’s embrace of artificial intelligence.
“It definitely represents a really meaningful milestone in AI-human creative collaboration,” said Thao Nguyen, an immersive arts and emerging technologies agent at CAA. “I think it will set a precedent on how we reimagine culturally significant media.”
The creative team faced a delicate challenge: to enhance the original film’s visuals for Sphere’s massive 16K screens without undermining its cultural legacy. “If you touch anything about this sacred piece of cinema, you’re toast,” warned Oscar-winning VFX supervisor Ben Grossmann.
To achieve this, engineers trained generative AI models—under strict Warner Bros controls—on archival materials, set blueprints, and publicity stills. Rather than reanimating characters, the AI was used to restore lost details, such as freckles on Dorothy’s face or the burlap weave of Scarecrow’s mask, while “outpainting” frames to fill gaps for the venue’s immersive format.
Musicians also re-recorded the film’s score on its original sound stage, optimized for Sphere’s 167,000 speakers, though Judy Garland’s vocals and the original cast’s dialogue remain untouched.
Balancing Innovation with Integrity
From the outset, Warner Bros Discovery CEO David Zaslav and Google executives insisted on a “quarantine zone” for AI, ensuring the training data would not be absorbed into Google’s broader models. This safeguarded both the studio’s intellectual property and the integrity of the film’s performances.
The project has not been without controversy. Some critics have called it an unnecessary tampering with a cinematic masterpiece. Yet its champions argue that the enhancements respect—and even complete—the original filmmakers’ vision.
“Whenever we made a change, it was because we wanted the audience to experience what Dorothy was experiencing directly,” Grossmann explained. “We completed something filmmakers were intending to do but were limited by 1939’s tools.”
A New Entertainment Frontier
For Sphere Entertainment CEO James Dolan and film producer Jane Rosenthal, the project was as much about redefining moviegoing as it was about reviving a classic. Instead of a straightforward digital remaster, they envisioned a hybrid form of cinema, live production, and experiential VR.
Buzz Hays, Google Cloud’s head of entertainment solutions, described the breakthrough succinctly: “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.’”
Symbolically, the choice of The Wizard of Oz carries its own resonance. Just as the original film marked a milestone with its leap from sepia to Technicolor, its reincarnation at the Sphere may mark a new era for how audiences experience cinema—placing them not just in front of the screen, but inside the story.