Days after Jim Dolan won a long sought-after chip with his New York Knicks, the billionaire mogul is ready to roll the dice on a major movie bet at his unique orb-shaped venue, The Sphere.
The next movie in the works for a reimagining at the 18,600-seat venue is an experiential take on Jim Sharman’s 1975 cult feature The Rocky Horror Picture Show, which has become a staple of community screenings and has been adapted multiple times for Broadway. At the Sphere, Rocky Horror will unspool sometime in 2027.
While its Wizard of Oz experience had a price tag of around $100 million to bring the adaptation of the 1939 Judy Garland feature to the Vegas masses — including recreating a tornado inside the venue — it’s unclear if Rocky Horror will carry a similar budget. A Sphere rep declined comment on the adaptation’s price tag. The project is being put together in a deal with Primary Wave Music and 20th Century Studios.
“Through Sphere Studios, we are building a slate of original experiences that push the boundaries of technology and storytelling for this new medium, while always keeping the audience at the center of the experience,” Dolan stated in unveiling the project. “Since The Rocky Horror Picture Show premiered in 1975, it redefined audience participation and became a cultural phenomenon. With Sphere, we have the opportunity to take that spirit of immersion to an entirely new level.”
Oz, which bowed on August 28 of last year, has now reeled in $400 million in sales and sold 3 million tickets since its premiere. That’s an additional $30 million in sales since the company disclosed its earnings on May 5.
If Oz was a test case in the viability of adapting classic movie IP for an experiential venue, it appears to have passed with flying colors financially. That title included Hollywood-grade work from the likes of producer Jane Rosenthal, VFX expert Ben Grossmann and Oppenheimer editor Jennifer Lame. The creative team for Rocky Horror has yet to be revealed.
For those comparing the $400 million Oz sales figure with blockbuster theatrical movies, the back-of-the-napkin math works out to about $133 a ticket, far more than the, say, $12-$15 a ticket for a typical film. Notably, only one film, Universal and Illumination’s The Super Mario Galaxy Movie, has grossed more than $400 million domestically so far this year.
And Oz won’t be going anywhere, if anything it may be more firmly ensconced in the Sphere’s Vegas portfolio. “I think the biggest learning is that we can do multiple shows, even different shows, concert and features like Wizard of Oz all in the same day that the building can handle it, that the market can handle it,” Dolan told analysts in May.
The Sphere, a longtime vision for the mogul (who fronts his own band JD and the Straight Shot), had launched with concert experiences from the likes of U2, the Eagles, Dead & Company, Backstreet Boys and Metallica. Phish, No Doubt, Kenney Chesney are among the names packing the venue this year.
On deck, the Sphere’s studio is developing extreme sports film From The Edge, co-directed by Free Solo helmers Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin, as an original feature with a to-be-determined premiere date.
Dolan has plans to bring the Sphere concept to other major cities (“We’d like to move as quickly as we can to building multiple Spheres,” he has said). Early this year the company signed a deal to develop a smaller Sphere in the Washington, D.C., metro area.
Asked about other potential adaptations and its talks with studio rightsholders about IP adaptations, Dolan replied in its May call with analysts, “The leverage is that we’re the only venue that does this. So it’s not like somebody else can take that product and go put it into a big immersive environment like a Sphere. So it’s really up to us which ones we choose.”
