The state-of-the-art new venue opens Sept. 29 with a U2 residency, a Darren Aronofsky film — and the potential to change live entertainment forever.
For now, though, existential questions about Sphere will have to wait. There’s a U2 residency to launch — no small feat — and, a week after that, the premiere of, the Darren Aronofsky-directed nature film that Sphere will screen from one to four times daily on days U2 doesn’t play and that promises to harness even more of the venue’s considerable stable of technological bells and whistles .
For “at least three hours,” the two men “brainstormed and argued and laughed.” Dolan was resolute that his new venue should have an iconic shape. After ruling out a pyramid or a cube, he grabbed Dibble’s pad of graph paper, scribbling a circle and a stick figure, and holding it up. “I got it,” he told Dibble. “MSG Globe.” Dibble nixed the name; Dolan asked him why.
“Live entertainment defines this town, more so than gaming,” says Kate Wik, chief marketing officer for the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority, the government agency tasked with marketing and promoting southern Nevada. “It has been over a decade that nongaming revenues exceed that of gaming revenues. We are an entertainment destination.”
And as much interest as Sphere’s technology has generated, its business model is also challenging conventional wisdom about how buildings should be operated, particularly at the arena level. Traditionally, Dolan explained on the August earnings call, “if you have a team, they’re the first tenants in, but that generally only occupies 40 to 50 nights a year, and the rest of the time you’re renting out and you have a limited revenue stream.
Still, in a report published after August’s earnings call, Macquarie expressed concern about the lack of additional concert announcements and said Dolan’s warning of future bookings being potentially lower profile than U2 “softens our view on venue rental revenues.”
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