Paramount Pictures has released a 1:47 featurette called “Johnny Depp is Ebenezer,” posted to the studio’s YouTube channel on October 14, 2026, four weeks before the film reaches theaters in the US and UK on November 13. Audiences in Australia and Brazil get it a day earlier, on November 12. Ti West directs from a screenplay by Nathaniel Halpern, with Emma Watts producing through Wattsco, on a listed budget of $38 million.
Depp plays Ebenezer Scrooge. Ian McKellen is Jacob Marley, the dead business partner whose ghost starts the haunting, and Rupert Grint plays Scrooge’s underpaid clerk Bob Cratchit. Andrea Riseborough takes the Ghost of Christmas Past, Tramell Tillman the Ghost of Christmas Present, Sam Claflin the nephew Fred, Arthur Conti the young Scrooge and Ellie Bamber Isabel Fezziwig. Daisy Ridley, Charlie Murphy and Henry Lloyd-Hughes complete the ensemble. McKellen has said his own part of the shoot took six days.
Why this Scrooge is a career bet
This is Depp’s first lead in a major studio picture since 2018, and Paramount has built the campaign around him. He presented the first footage himself at the studio’s CinemaCon slot on April 16, then turned up at San Diego Comic-Con in July dressed as Scrooge to introduce the first trailer, which arrived on July 23. A second, full trailer followed on October 1.
West is the less obvious hire. He is best known for horror, from The House of the Devil in 2009 to the X trilogy: X and Pearl in 2022, then MaXXXine in 2024. He has touched the season once before, with a 2008 short called Christmas Decay made for an online festival of creepy holiday films, and he co-edits Ebenezer as well as directing it. The film is billed as a Gothic dark fantasy and black comedy set in early Victorian London, and its tagline, “The name you know, the story you don’t,” signals changes to Dickens’s plot. Cameras rolled in London and Dublin from January 2026, with location work at the Historic Dockyard Chatham in Kent, a site regularly used to stand in for old streets and waterfronts.
How Depp’s Scrooge lines up against earlier ones
Dickens published A Christmas Carol in 1843, which means this version opens 183 years after the book. The miser has rarely been off screen for long. Some of the best-known film and TV Scrooges:
- 1938: Reginald Owen in A Christmas Carol.
- 1951: Alastair Sim in Scrooge.
- 1970: Albert Finney, also in a film titled Scrooge.
- 1984: George C. Scott in a TV version of A Christmas Carol.
- 1992: Michael Caine in The Muppet Christmas Carol.
- 1998: Jack Palance in a TV film that used the title Ebenezer first.
- 2009: Jim Carrey in A Christmas Carol.
- 2022: Two in one year, with Will Ferrell in Spirited and Luke Evans voicing the role in Scrooge: A Christmas Carol.
Two things stand out. First, the rhythm. Taking the film Scrooges alone, from Seymour Hicks in 1935 to Depp in 2026, the longest wait was 22 years, between Finney in 1970 and Caine in 1992; Depp follows the 2022 pair after just four. Second, the tone. Most live-action Scrooges have been played as drama, with Scott’s emotionally driven 1984 turn a familiar example. Depp, whose best-known roles in Pirates of the Caribbean and Alice in Wonderland leaned comic, and West, a horror director, pull in another direction at the same time.
The featurette: what it shows and what it leaves out
The clip’s title tells you its purpose. At under two minutes, it is a studio showcase for its lead rather than a scene from the film, and it lands as Paramount moves from trailers into the last month of selling the movie. That is routine for a holiday release: featurettes keep a title in front of audiences between trailer drops and push whatever the studio considers its strongest asset. Here that asset is plainly the star.
The risk sits inside the same choice. When the first trailer came out in July, public comments on Depp’s return were largely approving, yet at least one critic objected to the campaign selling the film as a Hollywood comeback. A Depp-centered featurette does nothing to settle that argument. It also says little about the newest parts of the project: how far Halpern’s script strays from Dickens, and how much of West’s horror instinct survives in a release aimed at the Christmas season.
Those answers arrive in theaters on November 13, when the US and UK release opens.
Further reading
Image: Harald Krichel, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons
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