After a near-decade-long hiatus, Sharon Osbourne says Ozzfest is “absolutely” in the works for next year, saying the Black Sabbath frontman, Ozzy Osbourne, gave his blessing for the event to continue on in his memory before his death last July.
“Yeah, we’re gonna do it,” Osbourne said last month during a sit-down talk at the MIDEM 2026 conference in Cannes, France. “The last one we did was 2018. It was just a month before Ozzy got sick, and that was at the Forum in L.A. And 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.’”
Osbourne is envisioning turning Ozzfest — which ran from 1996 through 2018 — into an even bigger production, with plans to take the venture out on the road as a touring festival. Osbourne said the revival will remain true to its original inception, with heavy metal and hard rock acts leading the line-up, but with the possible addition of more genres.
The last Ozzfest was held in 2018 at the Forum in Los Angeles, with performances from Ozzy, Rob Zombie, Jonathan Davis, and Marilyn Manson. Before his death from cardiac arrest and coronary artery disease on July 22, 2025, Ozzy was able to give his fans a bittersweet final goodbye with a hometown “Back to the Beginning” show with members of Black Sabbath at Villa Park in Birmingham.
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