2001: A Space Odyssey. Star Wars. Star Trek. Tron. Blade Runner. Akira. The Fifth Element. Interstellar. Superman. Flash Gordon. The Matrix. That sounds like a list of the greatest sci-fi films of all time, but actually, it’s a list of the films mentioned during a discussion about the inspirations behind the Backstreet Boys’ popular new residency at the Sphere in Las Vegas, Nevada.
This past July, one of the biggest boy bands of all time celebrated 20 years of their iconic album, Millennium, at the technologically advanced venue, with two months of sold-out shows that generated a ton of buzz and interest. As a result, two more months of shows were recently added, and io9 spoke to Baz Halpin, CEO and founder of Silent House, about it. Silent House was one of several companies crucial to the creation of the show, and Halpin explained how a love of science fiction was instrumental in creating what some, like director Joseph Kahn, have called the “best concert I’ve ever seen.”
“It. Is. Mind-blowing,” Kahn, who directed two of the group’s most iconic videos—the monster-filled “Everybody (Backstreet’s Back)” and sci-fi heavy “Larger Than Life”—said on X. “You think I’m joking. I’m not. Perfect blend of their performance, creativity, charisma, and visuals. Think of the way people felt about the opening of Star Wars in ’77 turned into a concert. You have to see it to believe it.” Well, we have seen it and he’s right. Even if you don’t like the timeless pop music of the Backstreet Boys, the show takes you on an epic journey through the galaxy, filled with some intentional and some unintentional winks to iconic sci-fi movies of the past and present.
Halpin is a prolific producer of live events. He produced Usher’s 2024 Super Bowl halftime show, Joe Biden’s presidential inauguration, Netflix’s recent TUDUM, and Taylor Swift’s The Eras Tour movie, just to name a few. In terms of concert tours, he helped produce and conceive shows for Taylor Swift, Pink, Britney Spears, Usher, Harry Styles, and more. Recently, he worked on the Eagles’ residency at the Sphere and was first contacted about the Backstreet Boys in November 2024. Soon after, he and his team had come up with a proposed set list and overall concept, which they presented to the band.
“It was ‘Into the Millennium,’ 20 years of the album [and] it’s seminal for so many people,” Halpin told io9 over video chat. “We remember what that was like. We can remember the music videos. We can remember how they looked. We can remember the brand of it, if you like. So I knew I wanted it to be sort of futuristic sci-fi, but I knew we [also] had to have all the ballads. We had to have all the romance.”
To create that balance, Halpin decided to do something Sphere concerts hadn’t done before: tell one, full, cohesive story. “I thought, ‘Okay, great, we’ll do a space opera,” he said. “We’ll do it all in space and… let’s try and tie the whole thing visually from beginning to end. But what could we use that is relevant to Millennium? That could be our device to tie this thing together without making it feel like a movie and still living in a space to feel like a pop concert? And so I came up with the idea of a spaceship. The spaceship is Millennium and that’s what takes us through the thing. So it was a big swing to put all our eggs in this rigid basket of a journey from start to finish, but I think that’s what makes for the best experience in Sphere, when you can have your cake and eat it too.”
And so that’s what it is. As the show begins, a giant spaceship with the word “Millennium” on the back of it flies into the venue and then blasts off into space. And while sci-fi fans will clearly see a big spaceship with the word “Millennium” on it and think of the Millennium Falcon in Star Wars, Halpin came to that realization a little later than the audience. “I am a total Star Wars nerd,” Halpin said. “But, believe it or not, it only dawned on me that Millennium and Millennium Falcon [were related] when I was chiseling away trying to design the ship with our visual counterparts [at Blink Inc.]. We needed something that felt enormous. Like almost to scale…but also felt agile, and the Millennium Falcon, for me, was always that thing. It looked like it shouldn’t be agile, but when it moved, it really was, and so I think subconsciously that totally played in.”
That mix of direct and indirect inspiration continued from song to song. “Get Another Boyfriend,” for example, the show’s eighth song, sees the Boys in a very neo-noir setting with floating transports above, towering buildings in the mist, and small vehicles driving on neon lights. It looks very much like Blade Runner or Akira, with a hint of Tron, all of which were part of the conception, to a point. “So the Tron reference was actually something that we’re trying to get away from,” Halpin said. “Initially, they were actually bikes with wheels. And I said, ‘I don’t want that. If anything, they should be more like speeder bikes.’ So I went on this whole concept art dive on different types of speeder bikes. And I didn’t want any trail. I didn’t want any lightcycle trail or anything like that. But, you know, in this world, they’re gonna have a neon outline. They’re gonna have a sort of light-up thing. It’s hard because Tron… was so aesthetically singular, it’s hard to have an LED outline on anything, and someone not say, ‘It’s Tron.’”
In “The Call,” the show’s penultimate song, green lines of code run up and down the entire Sphere. It screams The Matrix, especially since both share the crucial element of a phone call. However, it was about evoking that feeling, not copying it. “In the Eagles, for ‘Lying Eyes,’ we did this moment where the handwritten lyrics of the song came down vertically like a chandelier, and then they would rotate them,” Halpin said. “It’s just an amazing effect, so I knew that long thin strips of text of some form worked really well.” Using real phone numbers related in different ways to the Backstreet Boys, the numbers move around like The Matrix, but then build and create shapes to pull off what Halpin refers to as “Sphere tricks.”
“Creating a box, creating a tunnel, creating a cone, creating a curve,” Halpin said. “We wanted blocks that would allow us to do the Sphere tricks and portray the phone numbers, [but] it’s hard to get away from that Matrix connotation. ”
“Quit Playing Games,” one of the Backstreet Boys’ earliest hits, sees the group in an unending cascade of block arrangements, which build to form a larger structure. Basically, it looks like a giant game of Tetris, a thought Halpin was very aware of. “I was very conscious of Tetris and conscious of trying to find all the ways that it’s not Tetris,” he said. “Primarily, we’re building a house. The lines aren’t disappearing. There are things inside it. None of the shapes are the same shapes.”
And yet, the Tetris look only came after another famous sci-fi inspiration didn’t quite fit. “We struggled for a long time with that song,” Halpin said. “I knew I wanted that song to be our surrealist, colorful, crazy thing. If anything, it would be more like a Fifth Element Luc Besson vibe. But the reason that we ended up with the blocks is that I wanted a Sphere trick where something fell on top of us… And so the building of a wall, where it’s slow, it’s continuous, it happens the whole way up. We get the Sphere trick that they’re able to appear from infinity, and then have it able to fall down on top of us. That’s how it ended up being blocks that were different in shapes rather than flat horizontal lines, just to give us some interesting.”
Ideas didn’t always come to fruition, though. Halpin explained that because effects in movies are so good these days, and audiences are so tapped into what’s real and what’s not, they expect a certain level of quality. So, if their effects couldn’t at least match what you’d see in a theater, they went in another direction. “We did try to do a black hole like Interstellar, and we couldn’t get it to look nearly as good as Interstellar,” he said. “So we abandoned it.”
“Into the Millennium” opened at Sphere on July 11, so all of this and more was put together over the course of less than a year. That’s in part due to the work of Halpin and his team at Silent House, which provided the concept, creative direction, design, and production, as well Blink Inc., which was the lead content design studio; Sphere Studios, which was in charge of making sure all that idea and tech came together in the venue; and, of course, Back Street Productions. It was a lot of work, but for Halpin, the moment he realized it had all come together was a few weeks before opening.
“Different members [of Backstreet Boys] came in at different times and had different levels of involvement but Nick [Carter] came to the Sphere show-and-tell with his daughter and sat right behind me,” he said. “Just hearing his reaction, seeing it for the first time, was this validation that not only does this fit their vibe and they’re into it, but they’re also blown away, even though they know what’s coming.”
After a wildly successful and buzzed-about first run of shows, what’s coming next for the Backstreet Boys’ “Into the Millennium tour” at the Sphere is more shows. Tickets recently went on sale for 14 additional performances from December 2025 through February 2026. And, who knows? That may not be the end. After all, everyone knows Backstreet always comes back (alright).
Whatever happens, though, Halpin is just glad that his nerdy inspirations, which utilized this incredible venue, helped the Backstreet Boys celebrate 20 years of their iconic album. “I am thrilled for them,” he said, “I think they deserve every moment of it. I think that people probably underestimated their power when they were announced as a band, and I think that now people are seeing that they’re the perfect band for the Sphere.”
Information and tickets on the December, January, and February “Into the Millennium” dates can be found here. I know I’m going back for a second spin. Will I see you there?
Here’s a video we put together of some of these moments.
Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Trek releases, what’s next for the DC Universe on film and TV, and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who.
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