In February 2005, Nightwish won the equivalent of the Grammy Awards in Finland in 5 categories among which « Band of the year », « Best album sale of the year », and the fans elected them « Best Finnish Artist of the year ». Tuomas and Marco went back to Helsinki in the middle of their tour to accept these awards. The last concert of the European tour was their biggest show: they gathered more than 10000 people in Stuttgart.

In March, their record company insisted on releasing a new version of Sleeping Sun. It came out as a single in order to promote their best of “Highest Hopes”. The new version of the video was directed by Joern Heitmann (who also directed videos for Rammstein) and shot in Prague in August 2005. In July, “The Siren”, the third single from Once, was released. In fall 2005, Nightwish played several concerts like, for instance, in the famous « Hammersmith Apollo Venue » which was sold out. After a short tour in South American festivals, the world tour for Once was about to end.

The last show was played on October 21st 2005 in front of 11500 people in the Hartwall Arena in Helsinki. The concert was recorded for a future DVD that was later called “End Of An Era”. After the show, Tuomas, Emppu, Marco and Jukka dismissed Tarja Turunen and her manager Marcelo Cabuli. The reason for her dismissal was directly linked with attitudes and behaviors that were observed during the tour and that were not in line with everything that Nightwish stands for.

As everybody can guess, the news came as a bombshell for the fans, but most of all in Finland where the national media – TV and press – made their headlines with the story. After all that mess, calm came back at the end of the year and allowed Nightwish to escape from its past and look for its new singer. At the end of 2005, more than a million copies of “once” were sold in the world. The album is triple platinum record in Finland, platinum record in Germany and gold record in Sweden, Norway, Swiss, Greece and Austria. At the same time, the best of “Highest Hopes” became double platinum record in Finland and gold record in Norway.

In November 2005, Marcelo and Tarja organized two press conferences (one for Finnish press and one in Germany for international press) to give their answer to the open letter Tuomas gave Tarja to announce her dismissal from the band. These conferences were painful for Tarja who was still weak and hurt by the public aspect of the whole story.