Vegas couldn’t do anything basic if it tried, and with The Wizard of Oz at The Sphere, we sure as hell weren’t in Kansas anymore.
The Wizard of Oz at Sphere premiered on Thursday, August 28, 2025 at the Sphere, the monstrous monument to media that sits deep in the desert. The Sphere is home to the world’s largest LED screen and now, through March 2026, the iconic Judy Garland film. The Wizard of Oz was released in 1939 in a nearly 1:1 film ratio (it was 1.37:1) and has been expanded for the sphere to a full 16K resolution built exclusively for the Sphere. Sphere Las Vegas Wizard of Oz tickets start at $119 which is steep for a movie, but this isn’t your local AMC we’re talking about. The 4D immersive experience runs 75 minutes and even comes with a squishy souvenir, if you’ve got the reflexes to catch it.
So, is it worth it? I weathered the storm tornado and can courageously say there’s no place like the Sphere.
This may be strange to say about a movie that’s 86 years old, but there will be spoilers for the full The Wizard of Oz at Sphere Las Vegas immersive movie experience. If you want to go in blind, click your heels three times and check out Las Vegas’s John Wick experience instead.
The movie makes full use of the Sphere’s 16K resolution wraparound screen, and to do this the adaptation team used AI tools, and it shows in parts. Some expansions where characters leave the primary scene and continue their path behind the main action can get a little uncanny. At times, characters take strange steps or hairlines adjust without provocation, but it’s not necessarily distracting… in the beginning.
Here’s where the fun starts – the tornado. As the crux of the plot touches down in Kansas, seats begin to rumble. Now, this isn’t your grandma’s tornado (unless you’re Judy Garland’s grandkid?), and everything in Vegas is bigger and weirder than you can imagine. The seat rumbling is novel, sure, but what happens next was where the activation earned the term ‘experience’. As the tornado ramps up, more and more wind machines kick on. At the peak of the tornado with wind blowing in your face, your seat rumbling as you lift off and get swept away, The Sphere releases tissue paper leaves to bring the debris of Kansas farmland to its Las Vegas audience. It’s a small touch that does a big lift to bring you into the world of Oz…