Sharon Osbourne has confirmed that Ozzfest is coming back in 2027. Speaking at MIDEM 2026 in Cannes on 02/06, she was unambiguous: “Yes, absolutely. Yeah, we’re gonna do it.”
She traced the gap back to the last edition, a New Year’s Eve show at The Forum in Los Angeles on 12/31/2018 — just weeks before Ozzy Osbourne fell ill. “There were no plans to stop it. We were still gonna do it, but Ozzy couldn’t. And Ozzy and I would talk about it, and he’d say, ‘Do you think Ozzfest would work without me?’ And I’m, like, ‘Yeah, it’s a brand. It will work without you.’ And he said, ‘We should do it.'”
That 2018 show drew 12,465 attendees and $1.2 million in ticket sales, with Ozzy headlining alongside Rob Zombie, Marilyn Manson, Korn‘s Jonathan Davis on a solo set, and Body Count. Outside, a second stage was headlined by Zakk Sabbath, the Black Sabbath tribute project fronted by Ozzy‘s longtime guitarist Zakk Wylde.
The festival’s roots go back 30 years, when it became the first national hard rock touring festival in the U.S. It ran as a traveling event through 2007, then scaled back to scattered one-off dates before merging with Slipknot‘s Knotfest for a two-day run in 2017.
Earlier this year, Sharon told Billboard she had already been in talks with Live Nation about a revival, and that the next version would carry a wider musical scope. “I’d like to mix up the genres,” she said. Her pitch for bringing it back centers on what she considers Ozzfest’s original purpose: “It was something Ozzy was very passionate about: giving young talent a stage in front of a lot of people. We really started metal festivals in this country. It was [replicated but] never done with the spirit of what ours was, because ours was a place for new talent. It was like summer camp for kids.”
The financial reality of running a festival came up during a 2024 episode of “The Osbournes” podcast, when the family discussed the challenges of booking talent without getting priced out. Sharon was blunt about the problem: “It’s great. That’s what we wanted — everybody to do spin-offs and do their own festivals, and it’s great. It’s great for fans; it’s brilliant. But why is it when it comes to us that everybody thinks that we are trillionaires, and so that every manager who wants their band on our festival wants one of the fucking trillions they think we’ve got to put on the festival?”
Ozzy floated the idea of leaning into lesser-known acts, and Sharon pushed back gently, stressing that headliners remain a necessity while defending the smaller stage as the festival’s real identity: “You can do it for a baby stage, but you still need the headliners. It’s always great to have the baby stage, I mean, that’s what it’s all about — breaking new bands. That’s why we did it.”
She also spoke to the practical value of that developmental setup for newer acts: “It’s very hard for acts who are not known to suddenly go and be in front of 50,000 people on a main stage at a festival and understand what they’re meant to do. It’s very intimidating. You could have maybe five thousand people at that baby stage, and then to go from five to fifty to sixty thousand people, and it’s really, really hard for baby bands. They’ve pay their dues anyway. That’s what it’s all about.”
When son Jack noted that most recent U.S. rock festivals are “basically just Ozzfest,” Sharon took it as validation rather than competition: “Well, it’s the same bands just going around and around and around. But that’s what’s so good, because we started something, people have taken it, and it’s still great for the genre. It’s really good.”
