Last week, The Wizard of Oz at Sphere in Las Vegas debuted, and it immediately wowed audiences. It’s not something you’ll find on the 2025 movie schedule, because from the videos I’ve seen, it’s a whole lot more than just a cinema experience. We’ve talked a lot about 4DX movies here at CinemaBlend, but Sphere takes that to a whole new level, and the videos that have begun circulating on social media show just how amazing its first major motion picture experience is.
Now, it’s time to up the ante and combine two of the best works of art in the 20th Century, The Wizard of Oz and Pink Floyd’s legendary Dark Side of the Moon, just like I used to on my 27” tube TV in college in the ‘90s. It’s already a big time for the classic story, with the box office success of Wicked. Let’s keep things rolling!
The Wizard Of Oz Looks Like An Incredible Experience
When I first started seeing videos pop up on Instagram over the weekend, when The Wizard of Oz began its run, I immediately started plotting a quick weekend jaunt out to Sin City to see it. I was lucky enough to catch four Phish shows at Sphere in 2024, and I was blown away by the screen, sure, but even more by the sound of the cutting-edge venue. For The Wizard of Oz, they pulled out all the stops:
The chairs shake, the wind blows, the leaves and apples fall from the ceiling, and that screen looks incredible, especially when you consider the movie is almost 90 years old (yet still incredibly influential). I scoffed at the ticket prices at first (even the most affordable tickets are over $100), but it’s easy to see from the videos that a ton of production went into this, and the prices, though shocking for a movie, are understandable.
Let’s Use That Sound System For Some Pink Floyd!
Long before anyone knew what “going viral” meant in a pop culture kind of way, we had things like “Dark Side of the Rainbow.” With a lot of people in my generation, word spread from coast to coast that if you hit play on Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon at the right time at the start of the movie (the second time the MGM lion roars), the music and the lyrics would sync up almost perfectly with the visuals of The Wizard of Oz.
For a while, we were doing it every weekend, it seems. We would argue over whether it was done on purpose by David Gilmour and company, or if it was just a happy accident (it’s the latter), and we loved every second of it. It’s an album I’ve loved since junior high, and I still love today, even if I’ve heard it hundreds or thousands of times at this point in my life. Now, I want to hear it with that incredible sound system at Sphere, while feeling the wind blown during the tornado with Clare Torry’s powerful voice belting out the singing in “Great Gig In The Sky.”
I’m still going to try to get out to Vegas for the “regular” version of The Wizard of Oz at Sphere, but if they cut a deal with Pink Floyd and combine it with Dark Side, and add it to the 2026 movie schedule, I’ll be first in line.
