The Wizard of Oz makes its groundbreaking debut at Las Vegas’ Sphere on Thursday night, and just before showtime, James Dolan is dropping quite the easter egg.
The Sphere Entertainment Co. executive chairman and CEO took part in a walkthrough of the experience with select press — alongside Sphere president and chief operating officer Jennifer Koester and visual effects specialist Ben Grossmann — and revealed that there is one specific A.I.-assisted change to keep an eye out for.
“I won’t tell you where, it’s only for like two seconds,” as he asked reporters if they were familiar with Warner Bros. Discovery head David Zaslav. After an affirmative, he said, “[They] replaced the faces of two very short, two-second characters in the movie with mine and David. I challenge you to find it.”
Grossmann was quick to chime in that “they were uncredited characters who were too blurry to be identified, and have now been enhanced to be identified.” (Warner Bros. owns the rights to The Wizard of Oz film).
It adds buzz to the Sphere’s already buzzing new attraction, which features an immersive adaptation of the classic film — 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’s massive screen, which the execs discussed heavily during the preview.
Grossmann explained, “We 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,” or embrace “a 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’t, because the only other alternatives were computer graphics that would be humans manipulating the performance.”
“We 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’s off,” he continued. “It knew what Judy Garland’s eyelashes looked like on that day in that scene, when she was performing, for detail and filling all of those things that were missing.”
And for those who bristle at A.I. being used on the 1939 film, Grossmann noted that “the original work of art continues to exist” in many other places. “We’ve adapted it into a new medium, and we’ve done it with what we believe is a high degree of authenticity and integrity to the original performance,” he said. “We’ve stayed in touch with their descendants. We’ve been in contact with the I.P. holders, we’ve 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’ve done all the things that people have been concerned about doing right and no one has done before.”
Dolan added that he doesn’t “really think that it’s a fair criticism” over the use of A.I. and wants people to see the movie before they cast judgement. Grossmann responded, “I 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,” working with more than 1,000 artists throughout the process.
Dolan — who said he plans to screen the film for the next decade at Sphere venues around the world — also took the moment to admit, “We went way over the budget. What we were originally thinking, we ended up almost two times what we were originally thinking. We’re getting up pretty close to that $100 million mark — it was worth it.”
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