Playing the titular role, MSG CEO James Dolan opened The Wizard of Oz at Sphere Thursday night. Famously, the Wizard is a charlatan in every version of the text. In the books and 1939 film, he’s relatively harmless. In Wicked , he’s basically a fascist. But in Las Vegas, where spectacle-over-substance is kind of the whole point, the Wizard was a beneficent showman. Kind of like James Franco in Oz the Great and Powerful?

The Wizard of Oz at Sphere is the latest Contrabulus Fabtraption MSG has put on in their Vegas orb. It is a “reimagining” of the 1939 MGM film starring Judy Garland.

So it’s the movie, but bigger?

Yes and no . MSG, Google Cloud, Warner Bros. Discovery, and VFX studio Magnopus upscaled The Wizard of Oz to 16K and used generative AI to fill the frame. Be

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