| The first blockbuster movie of the fall is an 86-year-old musical that was a failure when first released in 1939. The Wizard of Oz is drawing 4,000 to 5,000 fans to the Sphere in Las Vegas two or three times a day. Fans are paying an average of almost $200 apiece, according to Wolfe Research. That means the movie is generating ticket sales of as much as $2 million a day from just the one location. Executives at the Sphere estimate the film will gross hundreds of millions of dollars over the next year and could top $1 billion before concluding its run, according to a person familiar with the matter. New York billionaire James Dolan, the executive chairman and chief executive officer of Sphere Entertainment Co., licensed the rights to the movie from his old friend David Zaslav, the CEO of Warner Bros. Discovery Inc. Dolan then sank almost $100 million adapting the visually sumputous classic for the highest resolution LED screen in the world. (Sphere didn’t respond to a couple requests for comment.) The film exhibited at the Sphere isn’t your regular Wizard of Oz. Dolan cut about half an hour so that his version runs 70 minutes. The film is as much a theme park ride as a movie, according to critic Amy Nicholson. “When the tornado happens, the tech changes hit us like a cyclone,” Nicholson wrote in the Los Angeles Times. “A great, giddy blast of air from the 750-horsepower fans blew my bangs straight off my forehead.” Dolan told analysts in August that the Sphere had already sold more than 120,000 tickets to the movie and was going to sell 200,000 tickets before it opened. He is showing The Wizard of Oz every day, even when there is a concert at the Sphere. Over the next week, the Sphere has scheduled two showings Monday through Saturday and three on Sunday. Dolan spent $2.3 billion building the Sphere, worrying investors and analysts. Some dismissed it as a vanity project for a billionaire who is also the front man of a rock band JD & the Straight Shot. When the Sphere opened in 2023, much of the initial press focused on U2, the rock band that first headlined the venue. Reviews were rapturous. In the two years since, millions of people have traveled to Las Vegas to see U2, the Eagles and the Backstreet Boys. Concert-goers and critics have hailed it as the greatest new venue in music. But the Sphere makes twice as much money from movies as concerts, according to Peter Supino, an analyst with Wolfe Research. The Sphere will generate about $200 million in sales from concerts this year, according to Supino, while movies will gross closer to $400 million. And they are a lot more profitable. The analyst estimates films at the Sphere have a gross margin of 70%. When a band plays at the Sphere, the act keeps almost all of the ticket sales. The Sphere gets to keep most of the money from movies. Dolan has already sold more than 4 million tickets to Postcard From Earth, an environmental film from Darren Aronofsky. “If the Sphere were a hot dog, the movies are the beef and the concerts are the mustard,” Supino said. A traditional movie theater can only play a movie for a few weeks before the local market gets bored. Everyone who wants to see the movie has seen it. “In this case, most people can’t access this product until they get to Vegas, and they don’t get there but every four years.” Dolan has said the Sphere hasn’t reached its full potential. He will try to increase the number of concerts while reducing the cost of staging them, boost sales from advertising and corporate events, and franchise the Sphere other locations. In the latest quarter, the Sphere reported an operating loss of $83.4 million. Excluding some expenses, it had a profit of $24.9 million. Dolan is in the market for more film titles, many of them more contemporary. From the Edge, a documentary featuring five athletes doing extreme stunts, will debut next year. Dolan has also spoken to Warner Bros. about additional titles, including Harry Potter, and he’s spoken to Walt Disney Co. about a few titles, including Star Wars. Warner Bros. was more than willing to let Dolan assume the cost of adapting The Wizard of Oz. The studio gets a licensing fee and a small share of sales — all pure profit. Dolan keeps the rest. The Sphere can show The Wizard again and again to tourists coming through Las Vegas and program it at new Spheres all over the world for as long as management wants. The Sphere has been unable to reach a deal with Disney, which wanted to be more involved in making the movies. Dolan has announced plans for a Sphere in Abu Dhabi and is going to open smaller versions in other locations. That will mean more outlets to make money from movies. Because Dolan controls these versions of Postcard From Earth and The Wizard of Oz, they are evergreen properties that he can show in multiple locations. While the enthusiasm for The Wizard of Oz may lessen a bit over time — potentially bringing ticket prices down — it should play for years. “Ultimately, we’ll run The Wizard of Oz forever,” Dolan said on a call with analysts, later adding, “It’s hard for me to imagine a better product than Wizard of Oz.” The best of Screentime (and other stuff) | Netflix’s Demon Hunters plans | Netflix has partnered with Spirit Halloween to develop costumes based on its hit movie KPop Demon Hunters, according to a couple of people familiar with the matter. While retailers were reluctant to do much with the movie before it opened, everyone is now seeking to cash in on the massive interest all over the world. The film’s characters are expected to be among the most popular Halloween costumes with kids. Several songs from the film’s soundtrack still rank among the most popular in the world, while the movie is still the most-watched on Netlflix 11 weeks after its release. Netflix already sells T-shirts, sweaters and stickers on its own website, Netflix Shop. Spirit and Netflix already partner on Stranger Things attire. The No. 1 movie in the world is…The Conjuring: Last Rites. The latest installment in James Wan’s horror franchise grossed $187 million worldwide this weekend and topped the box office in the US and Canada with $83 million. That is one of the biggest openings for a horror movie ever. It ends the losing streak for Blumhouse and extends the winning streak for Warner Bros. Is Netflix making too many serialized shows?That’s the argument from longtime media executive Hernan Lopez, who crunched the numbers on Netflix viewership going back a few years. Serialized programming — shows with a continuing story like Stranger Things — accounts for a larger share of the library than viewership. Episodic programming, like your average sitcom, punches above its weight. People already feel like Netfilx has morphed into CBS. This data suggests it’s still transitioning. Two AI legal updatesAnthropic will pay $1.5 billion to settle a lawsuit filed by authors that accused the AI firm of copyright infringement. The headline number makes this sound like a big win for publishers and authors. But the court ruled that Anthropic can train its large language models on books. The problem was that it trained its model on pirated books. The AI company, which just raised money at a valuation of $183 billion, only has to pay $3,000 per title. “Seems like a win for Anthropic that it isn’t required to break the models, just delete the data,” Tod Cohen, a partner at Manatt, Phelps & Phillips, told my colleague. Deals, deals, deals33 1/3 publishes short books devoted to specific albums. The edition on Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly taught me a lot about one of the greatest poets of this century. | 
