🏟️ Imagine watching a World Series game without leaving your city — sitting inside a 26-meter dome where the outfield wraps around you and a home run looks close enough to touch. That place is real, it's called Cosm, and this week one of its biggest new backers turned out to be Sony. The Japanese-owned studio is putting $100 million into the company, and for Japanese baseball fans, the venue at the center of the deal already rings a bell.

Sony's $100 million bet

On June 24, Sony Pictures Entertainment announced a $100 million investment in Cosm, leading the company's Series C funding round and taking a minority stake. Ravi Ahuja, the chairman and CEO of Sony Pictures, is joining Cosm's board.

A quick note for readers who think of Sony as the PlayStation-and-cameras company: Sony Pictures Entertainment is the Hollywood film and television arm of Japan's Sony Group. So this is a Japanese-owned studio making the move, even if the deal itself is pure Los Angeles.

Sony isn't the only name on the cap table. It joins investors including Fox, Kroenke Sports and Entertainment, Marc Lasry and Bolt Ventures. And it fits a pattern: back in 2024, Sony bought the Alamo Drafthouse cinema chain. The studio keeps pushing past the traditional movie theater and into the business of experiences you can't get at home.

The dome that thinks it's a stadium

If you haven't heard of Cosm, picture the Sphere in Las Vegas — then swap out the business model. Founded in 2020 and based in the Los Angeles area, Cosm builds domed venues with a curved LED screen about 87 feet (26.5 meters) across that arcs over and around the audience. The company calls the experience "Shared Reality."

The trick is the cameras. Instead of relaying a standard TV broadcast, Cosm sends its own crews to stadiums and plants lenses where a fan would actually sit: behind home plate, down at field level, in the front rows. Projected across the dome, the footage fills nearly your entire field of vision, so it feels less like watching a game and more like sitting in a seat that happens to be a few hundred miles away.

Cosm currently runs three domes — in Los Angeles, Dallas and Atlanta — with a Detroit venue due in September and Cleveland to follow. It has shown the FIFA World Cup, the NBA Finals, UFC cards and WWE, and it fills the empty hours with immersive cuts of films like The Matrix, Harry Potter and Wonka. In 2024 the company raised $250 million at a valuation north of $1 billion. The name, fittingly, blends "cosmos" and "coliseum."

How the Dodgers brought Cosm to Japan's attention

Here's where Japan comes in. Since Shohei Ohtani, Yoshinobu Yamamoto and Roki Sasaki all landed on the Los Angeles Dodgers, the team has become Japan's de facto home club, and almost anything Dodgers-adjacent gets picked up back home. Cosm rode in on that wave.

When the Dodgers made their postseason runs, Cosm's Los Angeles dome turned into a watch party lit like a stadium. Tickets averaged around $35 (¥5,700), and you could get in for as little as $20 to $22. During the 2024 World Series, Japanese outlets reported that premium Cosm tickets going for roughly $1,000 (¥160,000) sold out in seven minutes. The Dodgers won that title — and then won again in 2025, beating the Toronto Blue Jays in a seven-game World Series for the franchise's first back-to-back championship. (In 2026 they're chasing a three-peat no National League team has ever pulled off.)

The Los Angeles tourism board has since started marketing Cosm to Japanese visitors, and Japanese lifestyle media have run first-person dispatches from inside the dome. Current prices run from about $46 (¥7,400) for a movie to $86 (¥14,000) for a game. For a lot of Japanese fans, in other words, Cosm isn't an abstract tech story — it's the place they read about, or actually visited, while chasing Ohtani.

Does Japan actually want one?

Short answer: the demand is already on the record. Whenever clips of Cosm spread on Japanese social media — an August 2024 one showed a Premier League opener inside the dome, and the World Series ticket frenzy made news too — the reaction was a chorus of disbelief and longing: "Wait, that's a screen?" "Bring it to Japan." Japanese sports media even ran the reactions under headlines about fans craving a homegrown version.

So far, Cosm itself hasn't named Japan; its stated plan is more U.S. and overseas venues, with international locations "to be announced soon" and a reported goal of 50 sites worldwide by 2030. But the immersive-dome wave is already reaching Japan's shore through a rival. In March 2026, Japan's SBI Holdings said it was in talks with Madison Square Garden Entertainment to build a Tokyo version of the Sphere — the Las Vegas orb — on the Odaiba waterfront, a roughly ¥350 billion ($2.2 billion) project aimed at a 2030 opening. The Sphere leans toward concerts and cinematic shows while Cosm leans toward live sports, but the underlying bet is the same: that people will pay to be wrapped inside a screen.

Spider-Man in the round?

So why would a movie studio want a piece of a sports-dome company? Because Sony has a vault, and Cosm has screens unlike anyone else's.

According to people familiar with the deal, Sony plans to experiment with its own franchises in the format — think Spider-Man, Ghostbusters, anime titles and films from its "Classics" library — with the first projects expected to be announced before the end of the year. Music, games and interactive formats are reportedly on the table too. The logic is the same one behind the Alamo deal: as streaming swallows the living room, the theater's best argument becomes offering something the living room can't.

Whether immersive domes turn into the next category of going out — somewhere between a stadium and a streaming app — or stay a pricey novelty is the open question. Sony, for its part, has just made a nine-figure argument for the former.

Your country's version of the big screen

In Japan, the Dodgers are something you watch at 9 a.m. on a streaming app with Japanese commentary, half-awake before work. In Los Angeles, you can sit inside a glowing dome and practically feel the infield dirt. Two completely different rituals for the same game.

How do you watch the big matches where you live — packed into a bar, alone on your phone, or somewhere in between? And would you pay stadium money to feel like you're standing on the field without ever leaving town?

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