Depp's Scrooge is a comeback test dressed as a Christmas movie

What's the safest way to bring a controversial star back to the big screen? You bury him under prosthetics, wrap him in a story everyone already knows, and release it when families go looking for something to see together. Whether or not anyone planned it that way, that is what Ebenezer looks like to us.

The facts are simple. Paramount announced a new A Christmas Carol in October 2025, with Ti West directing from a Nathaniel Halpern script and Johnny Depp as Scrooge. The cast around him is deep: Ian McKellen as Marley, Rupert Grint as Bob Cratchit, Andrea Riseborough as the Ghost of Christmas Past, Daisy Ridley and Sam Claflin. It opens in US and UK theaters on November 13, 2026. As Variety reports, the new trailer is pitched around Depp's first Hollywood movie in eight years.

The costume is the strategy

Look at the packaging. Paramount's tagline is "The name you know, the story you don't." Depp is the name, but the first thing the marketing sells is the transformation. People called him "unrecognizable" in its trailer headline, and reports from CinemaCon emphasized his physical change into Scrooge. At Comic-Con he appeared in full costume and introduced the trailer in character.

That is smart, and a little revealing. A character role lets the studio market an actor's craft instead of his biography. Scrooge is also a part about a man seeking redemption, which is hard to ignore as a subtext. We don't think anyone needs to say it aloud. Audiences will notice, and the film's own premise of redemption through supernatural visits practically does the work.

Ti West and the gothic angle are the real hedge

The cleverest choice may not be Depp at all. Hiring West, a director with horror credentials, and describing the film as Christmas Gothic dark fantasy gives the project its own identity. Even the genre labels are fuzzy: Wikipedia calls it a dark fantasy, while The Hollywood Reporter's trailer coverage calls it a "supernatural revenge thriller." In our view that blur is deliberate. If the film works, it's a bold new Dickens. If Depp is the problem, it's still an ensemble piece with McKellen, Grint and Ridley to carry the poster.

The ensemble also protects against a bad outcome. McKellen himself has said his work on the production lasted six days, so in our reading his presence is more garnish than load-bearing. Still, it reassures buyers that serious people signed on.

What the trailer and the box office will actually tell us

Here's the test. The trailer has already landed, and according to Wikipedia's summary of Stuart Heritage's piece in The Guardian, comments responding to Depp's return were largely approving, even though Heritage criticized the campaign for framing the film as a Hollywood comeback. Approving comments are cheap, though. Ticket sales are not.

If Ebenezer opens well, the question remains which Depp people bought: the actor or the spectacle. A strong result might just mean Scrooge in a gothic coat is a good hook, as it has been for generations of adaptations. Deadline noted in December 2025 that Warner Bros. had put in development a rival Christmas Carol from Robert Eggers, with Willem Dafoe in line to play Scrooge, so Dickens is clearly considered bankable. That means a hit doesn't prove a rehabilitated star. A miss, however, would be a clearer verdict than any trailer reaction.

We'd say the honest read is this: the only way to separate Depp's pull from the Dickens brand would be a new original film, and that's exactly the risk Paramount chose not to take. This is a comeback with training wheels.

Our recommendation: judge the film, not the campaign. Go if the gothic Scrooge with West's sensibility appeals to you, skip it if it doesn't, and be wary of anyone who treats opening-weekend numbers as a referendum on a career. They can't be, not with a story this sturdy.