Torn-up playing cards keep flying through the air of the Sydney Opera House’s concert hall and hitting my face.

If the heist movie franchise Now You See Me – the namesake of tonight’s live magic show performance – is to be believed (and why wouldn’t it be?), a perfectly flicked playing card from Dave Franco could knock me out.

Thankfully, we’re all amateurs here: just a thousand-strong mix of families, tourists and, somewhat surprisingly, fashionable twentysomethings instructed by the four magicians on stage to fling cards into the air with abandon. No, not Franco, or his co-stars Jesse Eisenberg, Woody Harrelson or Isla Fisher – whose characters are known in the franchise as the Four Horsemen.

But if you squint you could mistake the on-stage illusionists for their Hollywood counterparts, in that they are also three men and a woman with red hair: America’s Adam Trent, France’s Enzo Weyne, Italy’s Andrew Basso and South Africa’s Gabriella Lester.

After eating live scorpions, saving an audience member’s iPhone from a blender and escaping a locked box filled with explosives, they’ve taken seats for the end of act one, guiding us through a communal card trick that inspires screams as everyone pulls it off at once. (Well, almost everyone: in my excitement, I lost all faculty to follow instructions that the children around me had no problem with.)

To be fair, not thinking is a core part of enjoying the ridiculous and ridiculously popular Now You See Me Universe, where magician-vigilantes steal and serve justice through sleights-of-hand that defy both the laws of physics and scriptwriting. (To be clear: I love these movies.)

While the first film, released in 2013, was a critical clunker, it became a surprise box office hit and spawned two sequels: 2016’s Now You See Me 2 and 2025’s Now You See Me: Now You Don’t. On review aggregate Rotten Tomatoes, users have scored each entry about 20% higher than professional critics and the series has raked in close to US$900m worldwide, with a fourth film in development.

In that, Now You See Me is a rarity: a new blockbuster franchise that has built an audience without the base of existing IP. Excluding new children’s and horror series, only one original film franchise from the past 15 years outpaces the Four Horsemen: John Wick.

“I think the tone of the movie is just fun trumps all else,” the threequel director, Ruben Fleischer, told IndieWire in November. “They’re a little silly or don’t make total sense, but I think you are just along for the ride.”

And now the Universe expands to a live show from the film studio Lionsgate and the veteran Australian producers Simon Painter and Tim Lawson (The Illusionists), debuting in Sydney before touring in 2026 to Brisbane, Perth and Singapore.

But promising to “transform the magic of the films into a live stage spectacle”, Now You See Me Live is a tall order. On screen, the Horsemen’s more elaborate ruses require millions of dollars and hundreds of hands to pull off – to say nothing of special effects. How do you capture that scale of spectacle on stage?

Well, you don’t. Now You See Me Live’s biggest sleight-of-hand might be nicking the franchise’s name. There are a few loose references to the series, including jokes about robbing the front row and a wonderfully cheesy bank heist sequence in which Lester dances around a video of a vault opening, pretending to press buttons on-screen.

But for the most part this is simply a slick, high-production magic show with tricks that defy logic and lots of laughs – not unlike many others that the Sydney Opera House hosts throughout the year.

The two-hour show blitzes through the full toolkit of tricks, with castmates (who will swap in and out on tour) each bringing their own flair.

Trent is our charming host, taunting the crowd with mind-reading and sleights-of-hand. Basso is the escapologist, tackling Houdini’s water torture tank escape, where he is submerged upside down and chained at his ankles and feet in a glass box. Weyne is all about teleportation, while Lester, a 22-year-old prodigy who attended the prestigious Academy of Magical Arts as a teen, dabbles in a bit of everything.

On opening night, the show is already well-oiled – but there’s still an element of risk in the unpredictable audience. At one moment, three-year-old Theo steals the show by derailing a card trick and running across the stage. The show readily invites you to catch out its tricks, too, with roving on-stage cameras allowing even the back rows to keep a close eye on things. Still, I have no idea how any of it worked.

It’s also surprisingly touching. At one point, Lester gives a mini speech about how live entertainment connects strangers in shared wonder – and to prove it, she picks two strangers sitting seats apart to hold out their arms towards each other. When they flip their palms up, they’ve both been marked in the same spot.

Written out, it’s rote and cringe. But in the moment, it hits much harder than a flicked card ever could.

• Now You See Me Live is at the Sydney Opera House until 3 January before touring to Brisbane, Perth and Singapore