Google invented new ways to alter movies with AI for The Sphere. It's sure to be controversial.
This summer, The Sphere in Las Vegas is going to debut a new experience: The Wizard of Oz at Sphere. And it's doing so with the help of Google and AI.
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“The power of generative AI, combined with Google’s infrastructure and expertise, is helping us to achieve something extraordinary,” said Sphere Entertainment Executive Chairman and CEO Jim Dolan in a press release. “We needed a partner who could push boundaries alongside our teams at Sphere Studios and Magnopus, and Google was the only company equipped to meet the challenge on the world’s highest resolution LED screen.”
Regardless of whether you've been to Vegas, you're likely familiar with The Sphere. It's constantly going viral with its 580,000 square feet of LED displays wrapped around the venue. The inside of the one-of-a-kind venue, which seats nearly 17,600 people, also features wrap-around LED screens with an eye-popping 16K resolution.
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The Sphere has previously shown films made specifically for the venue. However, this year, it will show an existing movie for the first time, the classic 1939 film The Wizard of Oz. As the Wall Street Journal reports, doing so isn't such a simple task; it's actually quite the process.
“Very, very, very big and very, very difficult,” the Wall Street Journal reported Google's director for AI foundation research Steven Hickson as saying. “There are scenes where the scarecrow’s nose is like 10 pixels.”
Why is that a problem? The Sphere's indoor display has more than 170 million pixels.
To reformat The Wizard of Oz for the world's biggest screen, The Sphere brought in the Google Deepmind team to help create an all-new experience with AI.
Generative AI remains controversial among cinephiles
The obvious use of AI here is to upscale the picture, which Google did. AI upscaling enhances an image's resolution by not just resizing the image to make it larger, but also by filling in any missing details from the original image. This helps with the resolution issue. While AI upscaling is probably the least controversial use of artificial intelligence in art or filmmaking, it can also produce some disastrous results. Take, for example, this AI upscaling screenshot taken from an episode of I Love Lucy on Blu-Ray (click the image below to see what we mean).
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With Google's AI team working on this big project, alongside input from The Wizard of Oz rights-holder Warner Bros. Discovery, it's unlikely that we will see any AI upscaling issues like this. However, the Wall Street Journal report also includes a small before-and-after sample of Google's AI work on The Wizard of Oz for The Sphere, and minor glitches such as AI artifacts can be clearly seen.
However, the Sphere experience also takes things much further than video upscaling.
As the Journal reports, Google used generative AI models from its Gemini family, including Veo 2 and Imagen 3, to reimagine entire shots with extended backgrounds and to include characters missing from view. That means audiences will see beyond what the cameras originally caught in frame. Google's AI technology will generate these extensions based on what it believes could be there, taking into account the entirety of the full-length film.
Again, this goes beyond enhancing an image to show an artist's work on a larger screen. Filmmakers shoot and frame shots in specific ways for artistic purposes, and generative AI could compromise the original vision.
Earlier this month, a similar generative AI recreation went viral on social media for all the wrong reasons. A user on X uploaded a video of AI recreations of shots from filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky. For example, in one scene, generative AI recreated a still shot so that the camera moved 360 degrees around the actor. The post received over 4,000 likes.
However, another X user criticized the use of AI to recreate Tarkovsky's vision.
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"If the camera was supposed to move, then Tarkovsky would have had the camera move," said user The Kino Corner.
The critique received more than 305,000 likes.
Generative AI is still a very controversial subject in the film industry and the art community as a whole. Mashable has previously reported on the backlash against the use of AI in movies like The Brutalist and Late Night with the Devil.
However, it does seem like The Wizard of Oz at Sphere is unlikely to cause too much controversy, as it's being created for a very specific event that can only be experienced at one venue in Las Vegas.
With that said, the success of The Wizard of Oz at Sphere could help mainstream the use of AI in filmmaking and lead to wider adoption in the industry. Expect there to be a lot of eyes on Oz at The Sphere, even if they aren't physically there to experience it.
The Wizard of Oz at Sphere opens on August 28, 2025.
UPDATE: Apr. 10, 2025, 10:40 p.m. EDT A previous version of this article described a statement from Sphere Entertainment Executive Chairman and CEO Jim Dolan as being "provided to Mashable." This statement was made in a public press release.
