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The classic 1933 movie The Wizard of Oz is filled with famous characters, like the Cowardly Lion, the Wicked Witch of the West, and of course Dorothy Gale herself. But if you go see the new immersive version at Las Vegas’ Sphere, there will be two new faces in the crowd: Sphere Entertainment Co. CEO James Dolan and Warner Bros. Discovery’s David Zaslav.
Dolan revealed this information to press during a walkthrough of the Wizard of Oz experience, which alters the original film to fit across the mammoth Sphere screen, while trimming the length of the film to allow for more daily viewings. It also replaces the faces of two characters in the movie with the faces of Dolan and Zaslav.
“I won’t tell you where, it’s only for like two seconds,” The Hollywood Reporter quotes Dolan saying. Visual effects specialist Ben Grossmann then clarified that the original characters were uncredited and “too blurry to be identified” on screen. (Munchkins, perhaps? Or residents of the Emerald City?)
Dolan also noted to journalists that the Wizard of Oz project has gone way over budget, “getting up pretty close to that $100 million mark.” However, he added, “It was worth it.”
The use of AI to translate The Wizard of Oz to this massive screen has been controversial, as Consequence’s own Wren Graves recently explained. Yet with Wicked: For Good hitting theaters soon and a new live-action series about Dorothy in the works, L. Frank Baum’s classic stories remain in the public imagination.
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