The Wizard of Oz is making more money in 2025 than most new blockbusters, and it’s doing it in Las Vegas of all places. At the Sphere, an 86-year-old movie that once lost money at the box office is now pulling in as much as $2 million a day. Two million dollars. One location. Tickets run close to $200 a head, and every screening is packed. What audiences are buying isn’t nostalgia—it’s a spectacle that rewires a classic into something closer to an amusement ride.
James Dolan, the billionaire who built the $2.3 billion Sphere, licensed the rights from Warner Bros. and spent nearly $100 million re-engineering the film for the venue’s wraparound 16K LED screen. He cut half an hour from the runtime, dropping the story to about 77 minutes. Gone are the lulls; what’s left is a lean machine of tornadoes, flying monkeys, and Emerald City bombast, layered with 4D effects. Giant fans hammer the audience during the cyclone. Scent machines pump in Kansas dust. Drones circle overhead. The Wizard of Oz isn’t a film anymore—it’s a controlled sensory attack.
And it’s working. Critics might roll their eyes, but thousands of tourists are lining up daily, making the Sphere a money-printing machine. Dolan has said he expects Oz to pass a billion dollars before the run is over. For context: this is a single film, in a single venue, grossing more than most worldwide theatrical releases. Investors who once dismissed the Sphere as a vanity project are now re-calculating.
The financial model explains everything. When U2 or the Eagles play the Sphere, they keep the bulk of the ticket revenue. With films, the venue takes home the lion’s share. Wolfe Research estimates that movies at the Sphere are twice as profitable as concerts, with margins above 70 percent. It’s not just the novelty of seeing Judy Garland on the biggest screen in the world—it’s the smartest hustle in Vegas right now.
And the bigger question: what’s next?
Dolan has already spoken with Warner Bros. about Harry Potter, and with Disney about Star Wars. Imagine the trench run from A New Hope stretched across a 160,000-square-foot canvas, the roar of engines coming from 167,000 speakers. Or the Battle of Hogwarts with fire, fog, and drones diving into the crowd. James Cameron has to be pacing somewhere, sketching out how Avatar would play in a venue designed to overwhelm the senses. The man practically invented theatrical immersion; the Sphere might be the first space to meet him at his level.
Older epics are on the table, too. Lawrence of Arabia or 2001: A Space Odyssey could be jaw-dropping, but the issue is time. No one wants to sit through four hours of desert sands or long stretches of Kubrick minimalism when the entire venue screams for spectacle. The Oz cutdown proves the point: pacing is dictated by adrenaline, not story. The Sphere doesn’t reward patience, it rewards escalation.
That’s the real shift. The Sphere isn’t a movie theater, it’s a new category altogether. The trade-off is obvious: what plays here will never translate anywhere else. You can’t stream it, you can’t buy it on disc, you can’t scale it. It lives and dies inside that massive dome in Vegas. For purists, that’s a betrayal of cinema’s universal reach. For Dolan, it’s the moat around his empire.
Still, you can see the appeal. Disney already failed with its $500 million Galactic Starcruiser hotel, a Star Wars experience that collapsed after barely a year. The Sphere can deliver what that couldn’t: interactivity and immersion without the baggage of theme-park logistics. For $200, you get a two-hour trip into another world, no costumes or awkward LARPing required. That’s a deal most tourists will take.
The Wizard of Oz is the proof of concept, and it’s blowing past every financial benchmark. It’s not a preservation of cinema, and it’s not really a reinvention either. It’s something stranger: a way to resurrect old stories as high-tech attractions, stitched together with AI and practical effects, designed to be experienced once and remembered forever.
The yellow brick road now leads through Las Vegas, and it’s paved in money.
Hollywood After Dark 