When 'The Wizard of Oz' Meets AI, Who’s Really Behind the Curtain?

How Las Vegas turned 'The Wizard of Oz' into a test case for Hollywood’s AI future.

Photo illustration of Warner Bros. CEO David Zaslav as a munchkin, not an image from the new The Wizard of Oz at the Sphere in Las Vegas.

This is how technology innovation operates when it changes entire industries. People make grand and studied predictions about what will happen, and then someone goes and does something completely unexpected with the technology that changes how some people view it, forever. That is the case with the new, re-envisioned version of the classic 1939 film The Wizard of Oz, directed by Victor Fleming.

The iconic film has been reformatted and altered using AI to allow for an immersive display of the film at The Sphere in Las Vegas. The venue, launched by New York Knicks owner James Dolan, has been a hit, hosting immersive live concerts by U2, The Backstreet Boys, and even a major UFC fighting event. In every case, the visuals for the event have employed innovative VFX to create a new kind of immersive experience that appears to wrap the audience members in the visuals of the performance.

In the case of The Wizard of Oz, which began at The Sphere last week, the immersive visuals are further enhanced by physical effects like mist, wind, haptic feedback seats, and even faux flying monkeys. The reactions of the audience are proof that the experience, despite the film’s nearly century-old vintage, is winning over audiences. And it needs to, because some of the cheaper tickets are a steep $109 each, with some seats going for upwards of $349. Nevertheless, before opening, the venue said it had already sold 120,000 tickets, or roughly $13 million in sales, assuming we use the lower cost ticket price.

Ticket prices for seats at The Sphere for The Wizard of Oz.

So far, most days have two showings (occasionally three). With 10,000 immersive/haptic seats available (again, not accounting for the higher-priced seats), that’s about $2 million per day. Taking into account the fact that Dolan says the reformatting and enhancement of the film cost nearly $100 million, that means The Sphere could technically make back its investment in under two months. That’s a neat trick for an 86-year-old film most Americans have already seen at some point in their childhood. Also noteworthy is the fact that the film will fall into the public domain in 2035, just a little over nine years from today. So now is the time for Warner Bros. Discovery, the owner of the film, to extract as much value from the classic as possible.

And that’s where AI comes in, as well as a bit of controversy.

DeepMind, Shallow Ego?

To help produce the immersive visuals, The Sphere turned to Ben Grossman and his Magnopus studio. I’ve enjoyed their work for years, most notably the company’s virtual reality (VR) experience called Mission: ISS (2017), which allowed users to explore the International Space Station in detail as if they were actually above the space facility. Grossman and his team took that long experience in VR and began working in 2023 to turn The Wizard of Oz into something new and unique. In fact, the experience is so stunning that some have claimed this could help revive Las Vegas visitor numbers, which have suffered a noticeable slump in recent months, triggering low-level panic in the usually packed tourist destination.

Exterior of The Sphere in Las Vegas. (TheSphere.com)

But Grossman’s VR skills weren’t quite enough. To fully enhance the immersive experience, the team worked with Google DeepMind to inject generative AI elements into the new version of the film. There have been generally positive reviews of the enhancements, with just a few quibbles about color and face treatments. But one change that raised quite a few eyebrows in Hollywood is the disclosure by Dolan that his face, along with the face of Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav (informally known as Zas or Zazz among insiders), who was key in making the deal happen at The Sphere, briefly appear as a couple of the munchkins in the film.

“It’s only for like two seconds,” Dolan told reporters at an early walkthrough of the experience, along with Grossman. “[They] replaced the faces of two very short, two-second characters in the movie with mine and David.” And before anyone raced to report that human actors lost potential background jobs due to the choice, Grossman claimed that the existing figures “were too blurry to be identified, and have now been enhanced to be identified.”

Seemingly anticipating backlash against the use of AI in the classic film, Grossman said, “We tested it for two years to make sure that if we used AI, we would actually have more integrity to the original performances than if we didn’t, because the only other alternatives were computer graphics that would be humans manipulating the performance.”

Somewhere Over the Algorithm

But did we really need Easter Eggs of two business executives instead of, more interestingly, a couple of well-known actors? Or, perhaps a couple of renowned fantasy writers who have a special connection to the film, or L. Frank Baum’s 1900 novel, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, the source material for the film. Sure, when you run the show, you get special perks. But those perks are usually things like a private meeting with the director or performers, or a revenue bonus, or perhaps some insider industry recognition.

The perks don’t usually include insertion into the art itself, unless it’s something ironic and self-effacing, like what you might see in Curb Your Enthusiasm, or, more recently, Apple TV+’s The Studio. In fact, The Studio is a great reference for this crossing of the line. Inserting Dolan and Zaslav into The Wizard of Oz, no matter how minute, is akin to Seth Rogen’s studio chief character, Matt Remick, desperately whining for a celebrity mention at The Golden Globes. In that episode, Netflix’s co-CEO Ted Sarandos appears as himself, and instead of intrusive, it’s thematically perfect.

Aerial view of The Sphere in Las Vegas. (TheSphere.com)

But Zaslav and Dolan in Oz feels like…a desecration. That it is fueled in part by AI is unfortunate, since this could have been a shining example of what AI can do to improve VFX and restore previously unsalvageable or missing performances. But as it stands, this comes off more as something of a dark harbinger of how AI might remake Hollywood. What happens when AI makes all things possible, as long as you have the money for the compute power, storage, and AI experts to smooth the rough edges? Apparently, it’s executives showing up in major film releases.

Meanwhile, the audience is happy, as long as the cinematic spectacle is grand enough, no matter how it was created. So don’t expect any protests from theatergoers. Proof of that comes in the sold-out shows at The Sphere. No, any reining in of Hollywood executives with regard to AI will have to come from the creative class. The SAG-AFTRA and the Writers Guild of America (WGA) strikes of 2023 crippled Hollywood, as the two unions representing creative workers fought for various rights, including the right not to be replaced by AI. Eventually, the strikes ended, and contracts were ratified, but the industry is still feeling the hangover effects of the historic work stoppage.

The current SAG-AFTRA contract ends in December 2026, and the WGA contract is up in May 2026, just seven months from now. What no one in the creative class counted on was the exponential improvement in AI tools from 2023 to 2025. From Google Veo to Runway ML, and many others, AI video tools have undergone dramatic improvements. So far, the initial human impacts appear to be primarily in the realm of VFX experts. But nothing about AI is static or slow-moving, so when it’s contract time in 2026, things may look very different, in favor of the Hollywood studios. At that point, someone from one of the unions may ask about the AI alterations of The Wizard of Oz. And that’s why this film, as a potential pivot moment for AI in Hollywood, is so apt.

At the end of the book, the “wizard” who rules Oz in secrecy through smoke and mirrors is revealed to be an ordinary man named Oscar Zoroaster Phadrig Isaac Norman Henkle Emmanuel Ambroise Diggs. No magic, just an ordinary grifter from the sedate confines of Omaha, Nebraska. A hustler turned bureaucrat playing at sorcery.

The cringey metaphor here is so poetically pitch perfect, Larry David himself would raise a bushy white eyebrow in grudging approval. But really, there’s nothing at all wrong with business-focused leaders working in the arts, and occasionally getting their hands a little dirty. Hollywood needs its executives to help run the show. But what happens if and when those executives use AI to become the show? I think this recent episode in the newly crafted land of Oz tells us that we’re about to find out.