When I am asked to explain what critics actually do, the best answer I have is this: we say what we saw.
What I mean is we describe what we experienced — what the movie, or painting, or song, or whatever became when filtered through our senses. In doing so, we invite you to come along for the ride, to decide for yourself what you see.
In my two decades writing criticism, I’ve rarely run across something that refuses to let me see it just one way, but one such resistor is “The Wizard of Oz” at Sphere in Las Vegas. Perhaps you’ve heard about it: the beloved 1939 film starring Judy Garland, widely considered one of the greatest Hollywood classics, has been stretched and morphed and adapted to fit the enormous dome-shaped venue. Being in Sphere feels like perching inside a massive bubble, only it’s lined with an IMAX screen that’s pulled over your head, and a bit behind and down the sides, so you have to swivel like a bobblehead to see it all.
It’s primarily been a concert venue, hosting acts from U2 to the Backstreet Boys. “The Wizard of Oz” is the first attempt at adapting an existing movie for the place — including a partnership with Google that sparked controversy over the use of artificial intelligence technology ahead of its premiere on Aug. 28, with a planned run through March 2026.
I headed west for the premiere, having heard a lot of opinions about the whole thing. But my job is to see what it is I see. And as I sat in my center seat, head twisting, forehead wrinkling, dodging foam apples and flying monkeys, I couldn’t see it just one way.
So here instead are three ways of seeing “The Wizard of Oz” at Sphere. I’ll let you decide.
It’s a Testament to the Theatrical Experience
For inscrutable and shortsighted reasons, most entertainment companies have spent the last decade trying to convince us that we don’t want to watch entertainment in one another’s company, on screens that are bigger than us. When we show up to theaters en masse anyhow, to see “Sinners” or “KPop Demon Hunters,” they seem shocked.
To conventional industry wisdom, this “Wizard of Oz” offers a big, brash counterpunch. People like cinematic experiences, and they like enjoying them together — sitting in a room, facing the same direction as a bunch of other people, and letting yourself get swept away by a something huge. By a movie that’s rounding on its 90th birthday, no less.
Legend has it that early movie audiences thought a train was going to run them over or the gunman would fire live bullets, and that astonishment has been a kind of never-ending white whale for exhibitors ever since. So we get bigger and wider and taller screens, Smell-O-Vision, IMAX, ScreenX, 3-D, and a host of shorter and longer-lived innovations. I’ve heard some people argue that Sphere is another evolution in that lineage.
I wouldn’t go that far. It’s expensive for now, both to develop and attend, and a long way from getting cheaper. Its kinks will also be tricky to iron out — for instance, the room stays bright the whole time, since the screen lights everything, and that cuts down drastically on the illusion of immersion.
But it’s undeniably cool, especially because Sphere’s “Wizard” dips into all kinds of Vegas-appropriate razzle-dazzle effects. The razzly-dazzliest is the tornado, which is ferocious: the wind howls, blowing leaves across your face (cover your open cup), the seats shake and the room smells of dirt. Later, real snow falls in the poppy fields. Plumes of actual fire appear when Dorothy and her friends reach the Wizard’s inner chambers. And yes, there are flying (inflatable) monkeys. I was lucky enough to be seated next to a child — the best way to watch a movie like this — who was vocally delighted by all of it.
But then, there’s this: the first big audience applause moment came when Toto returned to Dorothy, hopping through her bedroom window. Another big cheer occurred when the Wicked Witch of the West finally dissolved. Neither of these were accompanied by fancy new effects. They’re just good old-fashioned movie magic.
It’s the End of Cinema
Hyperbolic? Yeah, definitely. But I don’t feel comfortable saying that what I saw at Sphere was “The Wizard of Oz.” Despite its presentation as such, it’s not even really “a movie.” And for long stretches, I was deeply unnerved.
The fundamental talent any great filmmaker possesses is knowing how to direct (or misdirect) the viewer’s visual attention. Cinema is, and always has been, primarily a visual art form; the storytelling happens within the frame of the screen. But in Sphere, there is no frame. As a result, the visual storytelling goes haywire.
I kept wondering why it seemed that Garland’s close-ups were shoved into the very bottom of the screen. I even went back to the original film to check if I’d forgotten something. After some contemplation, I suspect she appeared crushed downward simply because the framing of close-up shots has become totally unbalanced in this new setting, with a vast expanse of sky above her head.
That matters. We’re primed to read any heavily bottom-weighted composition as signifying loneliness, overwhelm or even existential unease. Dorothy might be vulnerable in Oz, but she’s also the brave and capable heroine. This visual language telegraphs something else.
The whole film has been extended upward and outward with the help of A.I. as well as visual effects artists. The cool tornado created by Arnold Gillespie for the original has been traded for something digital, and eventually you can’t see it at all, because you’re inside the funnel. New performances and vistas have also been generated, and while the ethics of this feel at best questionable to me — using A.I. to resurrect the dead, in essence, and force them to perform for us — Hollywood has been doing that for a while, and that examination will have to wait for another day.
But more fundamentally, a lot of those new images just looked wrong. Some generated performances seem robotic, others smoothed-over and inhuman; the big, swooping shot revealing colorful Munchkinland was jittery. The actors’ faces are altered too: Dorothy now appears to have pore-free skin with drawn-on freckles, almost exactly like certain TikTok filters. In medium or wide shots, features can disappear, or seem vacant and strange. Occasionally, the effect is reminiscent of TV motion smoothing. (I will happily grant that the Wizard’s head looked very cool.)
In truth, I think most audiences will gladly overlook all of this, wowed by the sheer scale of the spectacle. What’s more upsetting is the running time, which has been reduced from 102 minutes down to 77. I’ve been told this was done to suit contemporary tastes — a thought both depressing and dubious — or to fit in more screenings, since there are three per day, and it takes a lot of time to reset the venue for certain effects and get thousands of people in and out.
Whatever the reason, the result resembles what you might get if you fed “The Wizard of Oz” to a machine and asked it to take out what it thought was extraneous. We sprint through the Kansas sequence; Toto is gone for scarcely a few seconds before he’s back, we barely see why everyone hates Miss Gulch, and no sooner does Dorothy spot Professor Marvel’s wagon than she is inside. The first time we spot the ruby slippers is when the Wicked Witch of the West does. The keeper of the Emerald City’s gates has no jokey back-and-forth about the sign on the door. The Cowardly Lion doesn’t sing “If I Were King of the Forest”; the Tin Man is permitted only a few bars of “If I Only Had a Heart.” And so on.
We still hear Dorothy sing “Over the Rainbow,” still hit all the major beats. But some of the heart goes missing, and some of the suspense and humanity too. The effect is not wholly unlike watching a movie on 1.25x speed.
I’ve no doubt the creators of this version of “The Wizard of Oz” love and revere the original film. But this is really a “Wizard of Oz” flavored feature-length show, the kind of thing that Disney has been great at making for their parks for decades. We shouldn’t pretend it’s an evolution of the movie. Yet it retains rather than reimagining just enough of the original film’s visual vocabulary to land in an uncanny valley, and in trying to straddle the line between “experiential storytelling” and “film,” does neither as well as it could, undercutting what it celebrates.
It’s a Harbinger of the Future
On the Vegas skyline, Sphere looks a whole lot like a crystal ball. So let’s peer into it for a moment.
We live in a world where movies aren’t considered art, but intellectual property. They’re “content,” little chunks of stuff that can be licensed, extended, remixed, rebooted, made into bedsheets and amusement park rides and whatever else will make money. It’s how the business has worked for half a century or more.
“The Wizard of Oz” is an MGM movie, but for byzantine reasons it now belongs to Warner Bros. They had to approve all the slicing and dicing and smooshing, the rejiggered tornado, the newly spawned performances, the reframed and reoriented images. And legally, they get to. They see themselves as the owners of “The Wizard of Oz” because, technically, they are — in fact, David Zaslav, who is president and chief executive of Warner Bros. Discovery, and James Dolan, the executive chairman and chief executive of Sphere Entertainment, had themselves digitally inserted into the film for what Dolan described to press as “two seconds.” (I didn’t spot them.)
But the question of who really “owns” a work of art is as much a philosophical one as a legal one. It goes to the heart of where art comes from: someone makes choices that add up to something new — to put something here, to make that cut, to add a pause here, to move the camera down a couple of inches. The reason Dorothy isn’t squashed into the bottom of the frame isn’t because Victor Fleming (or one of the many directors who finished the film after he bowed out) didn’t have enough space on the filmstrip. It’s because he, or cinematographer Harold Rosson, or someone decided to position her more centrally. That’s a choice, with a storytelling purpose. When you change it, you change the meaning.
Sure, works of art are altered all the time. George Lucas has famously tinkered with his movies long after release, for instance, and many filmmakers have fought with their studios over removing scenes or reshooting endings following test screenings. And of course, “The Wizard of Oz” itself is an adaptation, and one of this year’s inevitable blockbusters, the second half of “Wicked,” is itself both a takeoff and commentary on the same story.
Yet there is something disconcerting about this particular “Wizard of Oz”: it suggests that in the future, every artist’s choices could be reversed, altered or ripped to shreds, then presented by their corporate owners as if they’re essentially the original, just zhuzhed up a bit for a new century. I’ve heard the suggestion that the original filmmakers would have done all of these alterations if they’d been possible at the time. But even if that’s true — and that’s a big if — it’s both wild speculation and pretty convenient, at best.
You might ask, is this any different from those highly Instagrammable immersive Van Gogh and Monet exhibits? Of course it is. You might consider them kitsch, and you’d probably be right, but visitors aren’t laboring under the delusion that they’ve seen Van Gogh’s actual paintings. I’m not so sure that audiences will realize how profoundly altered is the underlying film playing at Sphere — especially since you see the original credits before and after. Maybe that doesn’t matter to audiences, but it should matter to artists.
I’m not saying there’s no way to tackle this issue in future Sphere movies. I’m deeply invested in every attempt at reviving and expanding the joy of communal theatrical exhibition. But that doesn’t mean throwing the meaning of a work of art out the window: the choices constitute the work. If “The Wizard of Oz” at Sphere is actually the way things are headed, then artists would do well to start thinking hard about what they’ll accept, and what they won’t, in the future. Who knows what venues lie on the horizon.
Alissa Wilkinson is a Times movie critic. She’s been writing about movies since 2005.
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