Carolyn Blackwood, the former longtime Warner Bros. executive who now heads Sphere Studios, lived through the boom-and-bust DVD era. Sphere’s approach to cinema, by comparison, has more staying power and potential, she says, because it involves much more than repackaging familiar images on shiny new discs.

“It’s not like we were remastering it for the Criterion Collection,” she says of last year’s release of a re-conceived, tech-fueled version of The Wizard of Oz. “Our goal and purpose is creating these unforgettable experiences. They’re intended to be their own thing.”

Especially after Sphere Entertainment revealed this year that the film has sold 2.2 million tickets and brought in $290 million in revenue at Sphere Las Vegas, owners of IP have taken note. Jennifer Koester, the company’s president and COO, says there have been “a lot of conversations” with studios, rights holders and filmmakers in recent months.

No future projects have been confirmed beyond From the Edge. The extreme sports documentary, co-directed by Free Solo Oscar winners Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin, is slated to premiere by the end of this year. Still, Koester says in a joint interview with Blackwood that Sphere has “only really scratched the surface in terms of how we can transport audiences and remove the traditional barriers that exist between content and audience.”

Visitors to Sphere watching the new take on Oz quickly understand that it’s something completely new. For starters, its running time is just 77 minutes—a full 25 minutes shorter than the 1939 original, with cuts blessed by Warner Bros. The venue, near the Venetian and just off the Strip, has the world’s highest-resolution indoor screen, a 160,000-square-foot display plane wrapping up, over, and behind the audience. Its picture is more than 120 times sharper than that of a high-definition television.

Our goal and purpose is creating these unforgettable experiences. They’re intended to be their own thing.

Carolyn Blackwood

Plenty else inside is foreign to conventional megaplexes or living rooms. Haptic technology (the stuff that vibrates a phone) makes the 5,000 seats at film screenings (less than one-third of concert capacity) rumble and pulse in sync with screen action. A custom sound system brings the same clarity and range it does to shows by the likes of The Eagles, Phish and the Backstreet Boys. Jets of flame or foam apples falling from the ceiling track pronouncements by the Great Oz and an orchard food fight. Actual flying monkeys float high overhead. And a tornado sequence sees wind machines, man-made debris, the scent of dirt and second-unit storm-chaser footage put crowds in the eye of the twister.

Along with a potent and unmissable set of artificial intelligence interventions overseen by Google, all of these extras help explain the steep ticket prices, which start around $100 and go far higher. But they also reflect a marketplace where moviegoers are willing to pay more for alternative experiences.

Among the premium players, Imax continues to show its clout as a box office driver thanks to endorsements from A-listers like Christopher Nolan, Greta Gerwig, Tom Cruise and Ryan Coogler. Cosm, a new “shared reality” venue operator whose massive, curved screens are now in Los Angeles (next to SoFi Stadium), Atlanta, Dallas and soon Detroit, has shown site-specific versions of films like The Matrix and Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. Former Miramax exec Joel Roodman is shepherding a new interactive storytelling initiative from Modern Uprising Studios. (Think “spatial computing”, as in the Apple Vision Pro, only on a vast scale.) Roodman says the startup will create “a new cinematic language and format.”

Another scaled-down Sphere location is due to open outside of Washington, D.C. by 2030, with a full-sized one targeting that year to debut in Abu Dhabi. Blackwood also notes that the company has built custom camera equipment capable of shooting bespoke footage for Sphere locations.

“There are a lot of different ways we do things and tools we use,” she says. Many cinephiles and film purists carped loudly on social media last summer about AI adding new Munchkins or characters never seen before. And some critics labeled the film an “atrocity” (Slate) and a “sacrilegious headache” (IndieWire).

Sphere productions are, Blackwood says, “a brand-new medium, which is not the same thing as shooting a traditional film, even with an Imax camera.”

Indeed, filmmakers she’s not able to name yet are currently talking with the company because they are “incredibly curious about pushing boundaries.”