{"id":183294,"date":"2025-08-28T23:11:09","date_gmt":"2025-08-28T23:11:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/183294\/"},"modified":"2025-08-28T23:11:09","modified_gmt":"2025-08-28T23:11:09","slug":"james-dolan-and-david-zaslav-appear-in-the-spheres-wizard-of-oz","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/183294\/","title":{"rendered":"James Dolan and David Zaslav Appear in the Sphere’s ‘Wizard of Oz’"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tThe Wizard of Oz<\/a> makes its groundbreaking debut<\/a> at Las Vegas\u2019 Sphere<\/a> on Thursday night, and just before showtime, James Dolan<\/a> is dropping quite the easter egg. <\/p>\n

\n\tThe Sphere Entertainment Co. executive chairman and CEO took part in a walkthrough of the experience <\/a>with select press \u2014 alongside Sphere president and chief operating officer Jennifer Koester and visual effects specialist Ben Grossmann \u2014 and revealed that there is one specific A.I.-assisted change to keep an eye out for. <\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cI won\u2019t tell you where, it\u2019s only for like two seconds,\u201d as he asked reporters if they were familiar with Warner Bros. Discovery head David Zaslav<\/a>. After an affirmative, he said, \u201c[They] replaced the faces of two very short, two-second characters in the movie with mine and David. I challenge you to find it.\u201d <\/p>\n

\n\tGrossmann was quick to chime in that \u201cthey were uncredited characters who were too blurry to be identified, and have now been enhanced to be identified.\u201d (Warner Bros. owns the rights to The Wizard of Oz film). <\/p>\n

\n\tIt adds buzz to the Sphere\u2019s already buzzing new attraction, which features an immersive adaptation of the classic film \u2014 like when that tornado hits Kansas, attendees will have wind whipping at their face, leaves flying in front of them and bolts of lightning puncturing the fog. It has also used A.I. to adapt the film to the Sphere\u2019s massive screen, which the execs discussed heavily during the preview. <\/p>\n

\n\tGrossmann explained, \u201cWe had a choice. We could either hire modern artists to reanimate those performances by hand, which we felt would destroy the integrity of the original performance,\u201d or embrace \u201ca new technology that allows you to train on things that existed before it, so that it can reproduce those things accurately. And then we tested it for two years to make sure that if we used A.I., we would actually have more integrity to the original performances than if we didn\u2019t, because the only other alternatives were computer graphics that would be humans manipulating the performance.\u201d <\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cWe actually found that that gave us more integrity to the original because when we would complete a missing character or an elbow or something that\u2019s off,\u201d he continued. \u201cIt knew what Judy Garland\u2019s eyelashes looked like on that day in that scene, when she was performing, for detail and filling all of those things that were missing.\u201d <\/p>\n

\n\tAnd for those who bristle at A.I. being used on the 1939 film, Grossmann noted that \u201cthe original work of art continues to exist\u201d in many other places. \u201cWe\u2019ve adapted it into a new medium, and we\u2019ve done it with what we believe is a high degree of authenticity and integrity to the original performance,\u201d he said. \u201cWe\u2019ve stayed in touch with their descendants. We\u2019ve been in contact with the I.P. holders, we\u2019ve licensed all the material appropriately, we made sure that the A.I. models, which can be controversial, are fine tuned specifically and exclusively on the original material. So we\u2019ve done all the things that people have been concerned about doing right and no one has done before.\u201d <\/p>\n

\n\tDolan added that he doesn\u2019t \u201creally think that it\u2019s a fair criticism\u201d over the use of A.I. and wants people to see the movie before they cast judgement. Grossmann responded, \u201cI think [with] the controversy around A.I. replacing humans through technology, we ended up employing more artists on this project than I think Hollywood has employed in previous years, just to continue this journey,\u201d working with more than 1,000 artists throughout the process. <\/p>\n

\n\tDolan \u2014 who said he plans to screen the film for the next decade at Sphere venues around the world \u2014 also took the moment to admit, \u201cWe went way over the budget. What we were originally thinking, we ended up almost two times what we were originally thinking. We\u2019re getting up pretty close to that $100 million mark \u2014 it was worth it.\u201d <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Wizard of Oz makes its groundbreaking debut at Las Vegas\u2019 Sphere on Thursday night, and just before…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":183295,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[185,47781,171,28456,83429,48576,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-183294","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-celebrities","8":"tag-celebrities","9":"tag-david-zaslav","10":"tag-entertainment","11":"tag-james-dolan","12":"tag-sphere","13":"tag-the-wizard-of-oz","14":"tag-united-states","15":"tag-unitedstates","16":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115108923761029881","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/183294","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=183294"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/183294\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/183295"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=183294"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=183294"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=183294"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}