The Rocky Horror Picture Show Is Heading to the Sphere, Where Commerce Outranks Art

The Sphere in Las Vegas has found its commercial formula, and it is doubling down. After adapting The Wizard of Oz for its 160,000-square-foot media plane—a move that generated $400 million in ticket sales and drew three million attendees—the venue is turning to another decades-old title with a built-in audience. The Rocky Horror Picture Show will be the next film to receive the Sphere treatment.

Owner Jimmy Dolan framed the decision as one of cultural continuity. “Since The Rocky Horror Picture Show premiered in 1975, it redefined audience participation and became a cultural phenomenon,” he said in a statement. “With Sphere, we have the opportunity to take that spirit of immersion to an entirely new level.” The logic is clear: a film synonymous with live, participatory ritual seems like a natural fit for a venue that sells total sensory overload.

Less clear is whether the project will escape the artistic void that critics have already identified in the venue’s approach. Reports from those who experienced The Wizard of Oz adaptation have described it, bluntly, as the opposite of art. The Sphere’s model so far has prioritized scale and spectacle over interpretation or cinematic integrity. Richard O’Brien’s cult classic, with its gritty, outsider aesthetic and anarchic humor, sits uneasily against that kind of hyper-produced presentation.

No creative team has been announced, leaving open the question of whether anyone involved will push the project beyond a branded light show. There is potential here, but potential means nothing without the right people in the room. The fishnetted crowd that has kept the film alive for five decades deserves more than a blockbuster-shaped souvenir.