Two New Documentaries Share the Darkness and Light of Ozzy’s Osbourne’s Final Years

When Ozzy Osbourne died on July 22, 2025, it shocked the music world just two weeks after the Prince of Darkness’s triumphant “Back to the Beginning” tribute concert. The all-day rock extravaganza in Osbourne’s hometown of Birmingham was last time on stage — with both his Black Sabbath bandmates and on his own — and he made the most of it. Looking frail but filled with joy and awe as he sat on his gothic throne, Osbourne shared a fiendishly potent and poignant vocal performance that brought tears to the crowd– and to viewers at home.

If viewers felt emotional watching the concert, get the tissues ready for Tania Alexander’s new documentary Ozzy: No Escape from Now, which just debuted on Paramount+  last week; and another film, BBC One’s  Sharon & Ozzy Osbourne: Coming Home, which debuted in the U.S. on Peacock earlier this week. 

Hardcore fans will want to watch both, but if you need to choose one, No Escape provides the most extensive chronicle of Osbourne’s final years. Filmmaker Tania Alexander started following the family and doing focused interviews with them over 5 years ago, before the Birmingham tribute had even been planned. 

“I think when we started, it was probably four years, and then it became five years, then it became six years, but Sharon wanted what he’d been through to be documented,” Alexander says in a  Zoom interview with THR. “We were talking about it potentially being a legacy piece … it’d probably be the last film that he would do, because it’s a big investment. We definitely decided we didn’t want a biography. This was very much an unfolding narrative.”

Ozzy’s latter struggles started after a fall at home in 2019, which made a pre-existing neck and spine injury worse, leading to multiple surgeries. Long recovery periods forced him to postpone his final tour that year and again in 2023, ultimately canceling it all together.

It can be difficult to witness Ozzy’s depression and the obvious physical pain he was in during his final years, especially as Sharon provides regular updates, looking weary herself delivering news on her husband’s latest ailments from Sepsis to Parkinson’s Disease. Thankfully, these moments are balanced with exhilarating ones, when we see Osbourne light up recording his last two albums: 2020’s Ordinary Man (with superstar collaborations from Post Malone, Elton John and Slash) and 2022’s Patient Number 9 (Jeff Beck, Eric Clapton, Zakk Wylde, Sabbath’s Tony Iommi and the late Jeff Beck). 

Alexander also gets great footage of Osbourne’s preparation for his Rock & Roll Hall of Fame induction as a solo artist in Cleveland last year. The rehearsals for the show are some of the best behind-the-scenes material here. Billy Idol and Tool’s Maynard James Keenan were tasked with vocals, but as Osbourne watched them perform his songs, he couldn’t help but join. He ended up kicking off “Crazy Train” (wailing, “All aboard!”) and joining in on “Mama, I’m Coming Home”  at the ceremony, a touching surprise no one was expecting.  

It’s equally exciting to watch planning for the Back to the Beginning concert unfold, and it solidifies something Ozzy verbalizes several times in the doc: without his business-savvy wife, he might not have accomplished half of what he did. He probably wouldn’t have lived as long, either.  

The enduring love between Ozzy and Sharon resonates in both documentaries. Coming Home was originally planned as a BBC series but was edited to focus on the couple’s move back to the UK when the singer died. It covers some of the same ground as Escape, but it was meant as more of an update to the family’s iconic MTV reality show, The Osbournes. 

The humor and bond between the couple, who rib each other at home and chatter back and forth in car rides to doctor appointments, is highlighted in both films. The less “set-up” scenes bring the viewer into their intimate moments, which feel authentic, awkward and sweet. Like real life. 

Even when Ozzy is suffering,  he’s darkly droll, such as when he talks about drugs in Escape From Now. “That’s the thing about getting old,” he says. “I used to take pills for fun. Now I take them to stay alive.” 

“They are incredibly honest as a family,” Alexander says. “There’s no spin. Ozzy wouldn’t know how to, he always says it how it is. When we sat down originally with Sharon, and we became more aware of exactly how ill Ozzy was, [she] was very clear: ‘you need to tell it how it is. You need to be as honest as you can.’”

Alexander says her film’s climax was pre-planned and never changed, showing the ailing legend as he looks out into the tearful audience at the Birmingham tribute concert and grabs the mic to sing. 

“Sharon always loved that ending, where it cuts to black,” Alexander says. “When Ozzy passed, I had six weeks left in the edit and I did think, ‘now that he’s passed away, would it still feel appropriate?’ But I never changed a frame. We kept it the same. However, we were asked by the family if we would bring up the funeral footage at the end.”

Both films close with beautiful and bittersweet scenes from Osbourne’s massive memorial in the UK. It’s hard to accept that the titanic  hilarious musical madman who helped define both music and television is gone, but his legacy is, as the family hoped, documented beautifully.  

“I think it’s a human story and it’s about the fragility of life,”  Alexander says. “It is about looking at what you’ve done, where you’ve gone and what you’ve achieved. Sometimes it is a bit harsh, because we don’t want to face what happens to our bodies … Ozzy was brave and he taught us, in a way, how to handle it. Not to give up. This is a story of resilience above everything else.”