Johnny Depp’s Ebenezer Premieres in London: Why Hollywood Can’t Stop Remaking A Christmas Carol

In December 1843 a debt-ridden writer named Charles Dickens published a short ghost story because he needed money. He hoped to earn around £1,000. The first 6,000 copies were gone by Christmas Eve. More than 180 years later, that same story is still paying people’s bills. On 9 November 2026 it filled the red carpet at the Odeon Luxe Leicester Square in London, where Johnny Depp attended the global premiere of Ebenezer, Ti West’s new version of A Christmas Carol.

Paramount releases the film in the United States and the United Kingdom on 13 November, a day after Australia and Brazil. If you are counting, that makes it one of more than 100 screen adaptations of the same novella. So the obvious question is not whether you know how it ends. You do. The question is why studios keep paying for a story everybody can recite in their sleep.

The cast list reads like a crossover episode

Depp plays Ebenezer Scrooge from a screenplay by Nathaniel Halpern. Around him, the casting team seems to have raided half of your streaming queue. Rupert Grint, forever Ron Weasley to a generation, plays Bob Cratchit. Ian McKellen, who has played Gandalf, appears as Jacob Marley. He has said his work on the film took six days, which is about as long as Marley stays on screen in most versions anyway. Andrea Riseborough is the Ghost of Christmas Past. Tramell Tillman, whom you know as the unsettlingly cheerful Mr. Milchick from Severance, plays the Ghost of Christmas Present. Sam Claflin, Daisy Ridley plus Ellie Bamber round out the ensemble.

There is a little Wizarding World reunion hidden in there too. Depp’s last major Hollywood film, according to ABC News, was Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald in 2018. Ebenezer is therefore his first major Hollywood studio release in eight years. Asked by The Associated Press at the premiere how it felt to be back, he answered with a shrug of a sentence: “There was a bit of a vacation.” Then he added: “Which is fine.”

Why the director matters more than the star

Marketing has leaned hard on the word “comeback”. The Guardian’s Stuart Heritage was among the critics who pushed back on that framing. You can see why. The more interesting name on the poster may be the one behind the camera.

Ti West made his name with the horror trilogy X, Pearl and MaXXXine, films that treat old Hollywood genres like a dress-up box and then set the dressing room on fire. Handing him Dickens is a statement of intent. Paramount described the first footage, shown at CinemaCon in April, as “a dramatic and stylized reimagining” of the story. Reports from that presentation highlighted Depp’s physical transformation plus a mix of supernatural horror and humour. Depp even turned up in costume at San Diego Comic-Con to introduce the trailer in character. The official tagline sums up the pitch: “The name you know, the story you don’t.”

That is a bold promise for a tale whose plot can be written on a Christmas card. But it also points to the real reason A Christmas Carol keeps coming back.

A story built like a format

Dickens did not just write a story. He wrote a format, long before television invented the word. One miserable man, one night, three visits, one transformation. The structure is so sturdy that you can drop almost anything into it and it still works.

Hollywood has tested that theory with remarkable enthusiasm. Alastair Sim gave the definitive gloomy Scrooge in 1951. Bill Murray turned him into a cynical television executive in Scrooged in 1988. Michael Caine played it completely straight opposite a cast of felt puppets in The Muppet Christmas Carol in 1992, which remains, by our entirely unscientific office survey, the version most people actually rewatch. Robert Zemeckis put Jim Carrey into motion capture in 2009. In 2022 Spirited turned the whole thing into a musical with Will Ferrell and Ryan Reynolds.

Each generation gets the Scrooge it deserves. Postwar Britain got austerity in a nightgown. The 1980s got a media boss addicted to ratings. The 2020s get a horror director’s gothic version, which feels about right for an era that has made true crime podcasts a bedtime ritual.

Why redemption sells every December

Here is our interpretation of the business logic. A Christmas Carol is in the public domain, so nobody has to buy the rights. Everyone already knows the characters, so marketing does not need to explain anything. Then there is the emotional promise. It is the rare holiday story that is not about romance or family reunions but about a person changing. That is a theme that never goes out of season.

There is also a quieter reason this particular version is drawing attention. A film about a man who is judged by everyone around him, visits his own past and is offered a second chance has obvious resonance when its lead actor’s career has been the subject of public debate for years. We are not going to retry that debate here. It is enough to note that the meta-narrative is likely part of why audiences are curious, whether the studio says so or not.

The production itself was relatively modest by tentpole standards. Wikipedia lists a budget of about 38 million dollars. Filming began in January 2026 in Dublin and London. The Historic Dockyard Chatham in Kent stood in for parts of Victorian London, cobblestones included.

What to expect when you buy a ticket

The first social media reactions after early screenings, collected by Variety, called the film a “wickedly fun holiday treat”. Full reviews had not been widely published at the time of writing, so treat any verdict as provisional. Bear in mind too that West’s films tend to divide audiences. If you want cosy, The Muppets are still available. If you want your Christmas ghosts with genuine menace, this might be your year.

Depp’s next film, the Marc Webb thriller Day Drinker with Madelyn Cline and Penélope Cruz, is currently scheduled for March 2027. So Ebenezer is less a one-off visit and more the first ghost in a longer sequence.

And the real winner, once again, is a man who died in 1870. Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol to pay off his debts. He would surely appreciate the irony that, generation after generation, Hollywood keeps returning to his miser for the same reason Scrooge’s nephew keeps knocking on his door: because there is still something left to gain.