On September 29, 2023, U2 opened a 40-show run of “U2:UV Achtung Baby Live” inside a 366-foot-tall globe just east of the Las Vegas Strip, and the live-entertainment business has been arguing about what it saw ever since. Sphere cost roughly $2.3 billion to build, making it the most expensive venue in the city’s history, and its owners never really described it as an arena. From the first renderings, the pitch was a display device that happens to contain seats.
A screen with a building inside
The specifications explain the ambition. The exterior shell, branded the Exosphere, carries about 580,000 square feet of programmable LED, the largest screen in the world. Inside, a 160,000-square-foot display at 16K resolution wraps up and over an audience of roughly 17,600 seated guests, or closer to 20,000 with a standing floor. Sound comes from a Holoplot audio system with some 167,000 speaker drivers hidden behind the screen, tuned so that different sections of the room can receive different audio, and thousands of seats include haptic actuators that vibrate in time with the content.
The building belongs to Sphere Entertainment Co., spun off from MSG Entertainment in April 2023 under executive chairman James Dolan. The budget nearly doubled from early estimates of about $1.2 billion, and a price like that only makes sense if the venue earns money the way a media platform does rather than the way a concert hall does.
Three revenue engines
The first engine is the residency. U2 played through March 2024. Phish followed with four nights in April 2024, Dead and Company opened “Dead Forever” in May 2024 and kept extending it, and the Eagles began a run in September 2024 that stretched deep into 2025, when Kenny Chesney and the Backstreet Boys also arrived. The electronic act Anyma closed out 2024 with the building’s first dance-music residency. Every one of those acts had to commission original visuals built for the canvas, because a conventional touring production cannot simply be trucked in and hung from the ceiling.
The second engine is cinema. Darren Aronofsky’s “Postcard from Earth,” shot on the custom Big Sky camera system, opened in October 2023 and has run daytime screenings ever since, filling the room several times a day without a band on the payroll. In August 2025, Sphere premiered a reworked “The Wizard of Oz,” produced with Warner Bros. and expanded to the giant format with extensive AI upscaling and outpainting of the 1939 film. The movies effectively turn the venue into a repertory cinema with more than 17,000 seats and premium pricing.
The third engine is the skin. Advertisers pay for Exosphere takeovers at rates the marketing trade press has reported in the hundreds of thousands of dollars per day, and the orb served as the most photographed billboard on Earth during the November 2023 Formula 1 race and Super Bowl week in February 2024.
Exporting the format
In October 2024, Sphere Entertainment announced an agreement with Abu Dhabi’s Department of Culture and Tourism to build a second Sphere, with the Abu Dhabi side funding construction while the company collects franchise and creative fees. That deal is the clearest statement of what the venue actually is: a format that can be licensed, the way a film franchise or a broadcast property is licensed. Content produced for one Sphere can play in the next one, which gives every show and film made for the room a catalog value no ordinary concert has.
The open question
None of this is guaranteed to pay off. Sphere Entertainment reported operating losses in its early years even as revenue climbed, and the list of acts that can both fill the room and afford bespoke production is short. But the building has already changed how Las Vegas casino entertainment is discussed. Resorts spent decades treating venues as amenities, useful for selling rooms and keeping visitors near the tables. Sphere inverted that logic, making the venue itself the destination and the surrounding casino business the beneficiary of its traffic. Whatever the balance sheet eventually shows, operators are no longer asking whether a venue can be a media property. They are asking who gets to build the next one.