Conan O’Brien to Host the 2027 Oscars for Third Year in a Row

Conan O’Brien is coming back to the Oscars — and at this point, it’s starting to look permanent. ABC and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences officially announced Tuesday that O’Brien will return to host the 99th Academy Awards on Sunday, March 14, 2027, making him the first host to hold the gig for three consecutive years since Billy Crystal did it in the early 1990s.

The news dropped during Disney’s upfront presentation in New York, with Robin Roberts delivering the announcement from the stage. Academy CEO Bill Kramer and Academy President Lynette Howell Taylor confirmed the rehire alongside a full returning production team: executive producers Raj Kapoor and Katy Mullan are back for a fourth straight year, and O’Brien’s longtime collaborators Jeff Ross and Mike Sweeney return as producers for a third time, with Sweeney also pulling double duty as a writer.

“We are thrilled to be working again with Conan, Raj, Katy, Jeff and Mike for the 99th Oscars,” Kramer and Howell Taylor said in a joint statement. “They are an incredible team and have produced such captivating, entertaining and heartfelt shows over the last two years. We are so grateful for their ongoing partnership as we honor our global film community — and we look forward to Conan superbly leading the celebration with his brilliance and humor.”

Craig Erwich, president of Disney’s Television Group, was equally effusive. “Conan has created remarkable energy around The Oscars,” he said. “His singular comedic voice makes Hollywood’s biggest night one of the most entertaining celebrations of the year. We’re proud to welcome him back and look forward to what he and the producing team deliver next.”

How We Got Here: From Reluctant Host to Franchise Player

For context on just how rare this is: for much of the past decade, celebrities have treated big awards show hosting gigs as something to avoid. The criticism can be brutal, the ratings pressure relentless, and the upside increasingly hard to justify. O’Brien, though, wanted in from the start.

“When the first offer came in, I told him, ‘You don’t need to do this, you’ve got nothing to prove,’” producer Jeff Ross told The Hollywood Reporter ahead of this year’s show. “When we quit late night, the goal was to only do things that are fun, things that we want to do. Well, this is what Conan wants to do.”

O’Brien himself explained his decision-making in characteristically offbeat terms: “There’s a little bearded Viking inside me. He’s been there since I was 10 years old. And when that Viking decides on something — whether it’s replacing David Letterman with no experience, skiing some advanced slope I have no business going down or hosting the Oscars, that’s what’s going to happen.”

His instincts have paid off. O’Brien’s 2025 debut as host drew a post-pandemic high of 19.7 million viewers, the night “Anora” swept the awards. Ratings dipped roughly 9 percent this year — down to about 17.86 million for the ceremony that crowned “One Battle After Another” as best picture — but social media engagement during the broadcast jumped over 42%, and reviews for O’Brien’s performance remained glowing. The Hollywood Reporter’s chief TV critic Dan Fienberg called him “very good” in his second outing and predicted the Academy would be quick to invite him back.

They were.

The day after the 2026 ceremony, Walt Disney TV exec VP Rob Mills told Deadline the door was wide open: “Conan has, obviously, a standing offer to host as long as he wants. 100% we’d love him back.” After O’Brien “signed off” at the end of the 2026 show with a sketch parodying “One Battle After Another” — in which he was appointed “Oscars host for life,” promptly killed, his body hauled away and incinerated, and Mr. Beast named his successor — Mills was asked if it was just a comedy bit. “Conan is host for life, yes,” he said. “He hasn’t even accepted yet. He’s just being told. We’re going to treat that as if that was fact.”

Turns out, it was.

The Team Behind the Show

The production team reassembling around O’Brien is no accident. Kapoor and Mullan both won Emmys for their work on the 96th Oscars and have built a real creative rhythm with O’Brien over the past two years. “Getting to reunite with Conan O’Brien for a third year at the Oscars is really special,” they said in a joint statement. “He brings that signature humor everyone loves, along with a real warmth and generosity that carry through the entire show. He’s a true creative partner, someone we trust completely, and someone who makes the whole process genuinely fun, both behind the scenes and on stage. We’re incredibly grateful to keep building this together and can’t wait to share what’s next.”

O’Brien himself has six Primetime Emmy wins across 33 nominations — including a nod for his Oscars work — and brings the same writers’ room sensibility to the show that defined his decades in late night on Late Night, The Tonight Show, and Conan. He’s also currently hosting the “Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend” podcast and the HBO travel series “Conan O’Brien Must Go,” so it’s not like he’s been sitting around waiting for the call.

At a press conference ahead of the 2026 show, he offered a peek behind the curtain on his process: he and the writers evaluate jokes for topicality right up until showtime, and he compared the experience to his early improv days at The Groundlings. “You just gotta let it go and go out there and let my natural low self-esteem take over,” he said.

The End of an Era — and What Comes Next

There’s a bittersweet undercurrent to all of this. The 2027 ceremony will be the penultimate Oscars to air on ABC and the second-to-last held at the Dolby Theatre, which has been the show’s home for over two decades. After Disney airs the landmark 100th Oscars in 2028, the broadcast moves to YouTube and the ceremony relocates to the Peacock Theatre at L.A. Live in downtown Los Angeles, beginning with the 101st Academy Awards in 2029.

O’Brien himself seemed to see the writing on the wall. In his opening monologue at this year’s ceremony, he told the audience he was “honored to be the last human host of the Academy Awards… Next year it’s going to be a Waymo in a tux.”

For now, the human is back. The 99th Oscars air live from the Dolby Theatre on March 14, 2027, at 7 p.m. ET on ABC and Hulu.