The Wizard of Oz is one of the most iconic films in history. It does not translate to the 160,000-square-foot screen at the Sphere in Las Vegas.
Google tried to reimagine the motion picture with help from A.I. but the resulting visuals are a huge disappointment.
It looks more like a background from a Windows computer than an Academy Award-winning classic. A movie needs to be made specifically for the Sphere for it to work, not the other way around.
The Wizard of Oz is a classic for a reason!
The Wizard of Oz is an 86-year-old movie based on a novel written in 1900. It was a very big deal because of its use of Technicolor, a three-strip coloring process that brought the vibrant and saturated colors of Oz to the screen in contrast to the back-and-white scenes set in Kansas.
Technology is obviously far more advanced today than it was in 1939.
And yet, the film will once again revolutionize the film industry in just a few weeks, when it premieres at the Sphere in Las Vegas. Thousands of researchers, programmers, visual effects artists, archivists and producers at Google DeepMind, Google Cloud worked alongside Sphere Studios, Magnopus and Warner Bros. Discovery to completely overhaul The Wizard of Oz.
The plot itself stayed exactly the same. The coloring stayed true to the original release. Not a single line of new dialogue was added, nor a note of new music.
Everything about the movie is going to look like it did during World War II… except the dimensions.
The Sphere required a complete overhaul.
The Sphere features a massive wraparound screen comprised of 64,000 LED tiles. It covers 160,000 square feet with 16K x 16K LED resolution. The Wizard of Oz debuted with a 1.37:1 aspect ratio on a screen no larger than 65-feet by 30-feet. The screen at the Sphere is approximately 160 times bigger.
Google used Generative A.I. to make the movie fit on the much larger screen.
“We knew that it was really hard to tackle using traditional means, but it is possible to do it with A.I.,” said Jen Koester, President and Chief Operating Officer, Sphere Entertainment Company
The massive IT corporation and its partners developed an A.I.-based “super resolution” tool to turn the tiny celluloid frames from 1939 into ultra-high definition imagery for the Sphere. From there, they filled the gaps created by framing limitations and camera cuts with A.I. out-painting. The last step used A.I. performance generation to incorporate composites from the original movie into expanded environments.
“We trained A.I. models on all of that original footage,” said Jen Koester, President and Chief Operating Officer, Sphere Entertainment Company. “So now we can create an arm for Dorothy or fill in her legs from that A.I. model.
Artificial Intelligence was at the forefront of this project.
A.I. undermines the original work.
Hand up— I have not yet been to the Sphere. Nor have I seen the reimagined version of The Wizard of Oz.
However, I can confidently say that I am not interested in making that trip for this specific movie based only on the first few images of the new portrayal. Take a look:
Lets focus specifically on slide No. 5 in the image carousel above. The scene focuses on Dorothy protecting her dog, Toto. It is shot close on purpose— to focus on Dorothy and the dog.
For this new A.I. version of the movie to zoom out on this scene discredits the original filmmakers. They could’ve used a wider shot if they wanted to. It was a well-directed scene that looks completely different.
To go even one step further, Aunt Em and Uncle Henry are modest midwest farmers. This new A.I. film makes it seem like they are living lavishly in the banquet hall of the Twilight Zone.
It looks bad.
Not only does the Sphere version insult the original work of directors Richard Thorpe, George Cukor, Victor Fleming, and King Vidor, the visuals do not do it justice. Here is how it looks in motion:
I feel like the screenshots of the "The Wizard of Oz at Sphere" do NOT do justice to how absolutely terrible it looks in motion. Watching how this is edited/moves to get to that Neil Breen-ass background is so much worse than whatever you're picturing in your head: https://t.co/16V43UTMF9 pic.twitter.com/DRublYKs5O
— Jacob Ethington (@JacobTalks4ever) August 1, 2025
This new rendering of the Wizard of Oz closely resembles the most famous computer background in the world, from Windows XP. You probably know the one!
The whole thing is computer generated, which takes away from the quality of the original film. It does not look natural!
Although I am impressed by what A.I. can do, I see no need for this specific usage. I am not going to spend my hard-earned money to travel to Las Vegas to watch The Wizard of Oz at the Sphere. Boo.