Johnny Depp is back in a major studio movie this Friday, November 13, and he’s doing it as the least likely comeback character imaginable: a Victorian miser who hates Christmas. Ebenezer, Ti West’s gothic spin on A Christmas Carol, is Depp’s first leading role in a major studio film since Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald in 2018. Eight years later, Paramount is putting his return right in the middle of the holiday season, opening on a Friday the 13th — a joke West himself could have written.
The movie hits theaters with critics split straight down the middle and one question no trailer can answer: does Johnny Depp still matter as a box office star? The reviews, embargoed until noon on Thursday, November 12, agree on almost nothing — except that this is a movie people are going to argue about. For a comeback, that’s already half the battle.
The comeback Hollywood spent eight years waiting on
Depp never stopped acting after 2018, but he did stop acting for the big studios. Since then he worked mostly in European independent film, far from Hollywood budgets and Hollywood marketing machines. Ebenezer changes that overnight: a Paramount production with a reported $38 million budget and a reported $5 million payday for Depp, per Variety — a long way from his Pirates of the Caribbean numbers. Paramount isn’t buying the star he used to be. It’s betting audiences still want to see him.
The marketing made that bet loud and clear from day one. Depp showed up at Comic-Con in full Scrooge costume — top hat, scarf, cane — and the studio put him at the center of everything, right down to putting Scrooge on Venmo. It’s a personal, almost theatrical kind of bet, and it fits what the movie asks of him: not a quiet return, but a character you recognize from ten feet away. Few releases this year carry as much off-screen history as this one.
What Ebenezer actually is: Dickens through Ti West’s lens
The story is the one you already know, and that’s part of the risk. Ebenezer Scrooge, a miserly businessman in Victorian London, gets visited on Christmas Eve by three spirits who show him his past, his present, and his future — and give him one last chance to change. Charles Dickens published A Christmas Carol in 1843, and it’s been adapted dozens of times since. The question isn’t whether the story works. It’s what one more version has left to say.
Ti West’s answer is tone. West, the director behind the horror trilogy X, Pearl, and MaXXXine, turns the tale into something gothic, dark, and at times genuinely scary, without losing the heart that makes it a Christmas classic. The movie runs 116 minutes, carries a PG-13 rating for frightening material, and shot in London and at the Historic Dockyard Chatham in Kent. Nathaniel Halpern wrote the script, Emma Watts produced, and Paramount is both studio and distributor.
Let’s be honest: West directing a Christmas classic is the strangest part of this whole project. His biggest box office hit so far, MaXXXine, made about $22 million total in the US. Handing him a $38 million Christmas movie starring Johnny Depp only makes sense if Paramount wanted something other than the umpteenth warm, cozy Dickens. And something different is exactly what it delivers — for better and for worse.
The cast around Depp
Depp isn’t carrying this one alone, and the supporting cast is the one thing critics actually agree on: the people around him come off better than he does. Rupert Grint plays Bob Cratchit, Scrooge’s underpaid clerk; Andrea Riseborough is the Ghost of Christmas Past and Tramell Tillman the Ghost of Christmas Present. The rest of the ensemble includes Ian McKellen, Daisy Ridley, Sam Claflin, Ellie Bamber, Arthur Conti, Henry Lloyd-Hughes, and Charlie Murphy.
It’s a cast with real weight and faces audiences know instantly, and more than one review notes that they’re the ones holding the scenes where Depp gets lost under the makeup and prosthetics. Grint, in particular, has the most thankless job in the movie and the most rewarding one: Cratchit is the human heart of the story, the man who suffers Scrooge’s greed and still shows him what he stands to lose. If the movie works as a Christmas tale at all, it’s largely because of him, Riseborough, and Tillman, who turn the ghosts into something more than effects work.
The reviews: 51% on Rotten Tomatoes, and an argument that’s really about Depp
The review embargo lifted at noon on Thursday, November 12, and the first number it produced was awkward: as of this writing, Thursday, November 12 at 7:48 p.m. Central, Ebenezer sits at 51% on Rotten Tomatoes with 71 reviews. That number moves as more reviews come in, so it’s not a final verdict — but it’s a clear snapshot of the moment. Critics are split right down the middle.
What’s striking is that the split isn’t really about the movie. It’s about Depp. Odie Henderson of the Boston Globe gave it 1 out of 4 and wrote that, under all that makeup, Depp is “easily the worst Scrooge I’ve ever seen,” calling the performance “a soulless, hollow shell.” David Ehrlich of IndieWire called it “fatal miscasting” and wrote that an unconvincing Ebenezer is a tough break for a movie called Ebenezer. Alison Willmore of Vulture scored it Fresh and still wrote that “Johnny Depp is the worst part of Ebenezer.”
The praise, meanwhile, is just as blunt. Rob Sperduto of MovieWeb gave it 4 out of 5 and wrote that Ebenezer gives Depp “his best showcase in years” and “makes a real case for a new Christmas classic.” Robbie Collin of the Daily Telegraph, also 4 out of 5, said the film “breathes a cool, fresh, spectral, humbug-free breath down the spine” of the Dickens classic. And The Hollywood Reporter wrote that Depp “really needed a comeback vehicle, and he’s found an effective one in Ti West’s horror-tinged adaptation that allows the actor to deliver the sort of quirky theatrical performance for which he became famous.”
For context: at 51%, Ebenezer is the third-lowest-rated Christmas Carol adaptation on Rotten Tomatoes, ahead of only the 2022 animated Scrooge: A Christmas Carol (40%) and 2001’s Christmas Carol: The Movie (13%). That’s a long way from The Muppet Christmas Carol with Michael Caine (79%) or Scrooge with Albert Finney (71%). In this story, the bar was set high decades ago.
The box office: what opening weekend is supposed to look like
At the box office, the forecasts have been moving. The most-quoted projection, from Box Office Theory in early November, had the opening at $17 to $24 million in the US against that reported $38 million budget. With presales picking up, the same tracker bumped its call to $20 to $23 million, and Variety has it around $20 million domestic and another $20 million overseas. That’s not a huge opening, but it would cover more than half the budget in three days.
The number Paramount is probably happiest about isn’t a forecast at all. According to Puck, test screenings scored in the 80s, with Depp himself hitting 90 among women over 35. If that audience shows up, the movie has room to run: Christmas movies live on legs, not opening weekends, and Ebenezer arrives with six weeks of holiday season ahead of it. It won’t have the weekend to itself, though — David Leitch’s heist thriller How to Rob a Bank opens the same Friday.
The bet here is the same one that paid off for other releases with a clear identity: this isn’t a movie for everyone, it’s a movie for a specific audience, and its fate depends on that audience finding it before the conversation eats it alive.
Why this version feels different (and why that works for some people and not others)
What West does to Dickens isn’t modernizing it — it’s darkening it. Brian Orndorf of Blu-ray.com called it “one of the more severe versions” of A Christmas Carol ever put on screen, while faulting it for staying on the surface and never landing “a triumphant celebration of redemption.” Andrea Chase of Killer Movie Reviews gave it 4 out of 5 and wrote that West “has gifted us with being able to experience the story as if we are seeing it for the first time,” recovering “the horror, supernatural and other, that was the Dickens’ intention.”
The case against it is that faithfulness works against it. Liz Declan of ScreenRant gave it 5 out of 10 and wrote that it’s “far from a total flop, but it fails to do what excellent adaptations must and find something new to say.” Nell Minow of Movie Mom gave it a B and summed up how a lot of critics feel: “The movie is fine. Parts of it are better than fine. But it never comes close to the far better film versions.” Donald Clarke of the Irish Times went 2.5 out of 5, writing that you can sense “a much better film longing to escape his awkward embrace.”
That’s the knot at the center of the movie: it’s faithful, it’s dark, it looks great, and it still leaves you feeling like this story has been told better before. Depp, buried in makeup and prosthetics, is the symbol of that tension — for some viewers the comeback they waited for, for others the very thing keeping the movie from breathing.
Is it worth seeing in theaters?
Depends what you’re going for. If you’ve been waiting years for Depp to come back, this is the one to see — it’s his comeback, no half measures, a big theatrical character built for him. If you watch A Christmas Carol every December, you’ll find a version brave enough to be dark, one that in its best scenes recovers the fear Dickens wrote in 1843 and the family-friendly versions sanded off. And if you like Ti West’s movies, his fingerprints are all over it: fog, snowy streets, ghosts that are actually scary.
If what you want is the warm classic, stick with the Muppets. Ebenezer doesn’t want to be that movie, and some critics are charging it for it. But opening weekend will say more than the reviews: if the audience that scored it in the 80s shows up, Paramount has its Christmas movie for all of December. The audience score on Rotten Tomatoes is still blank — the Popcornmeter needs 50 verified ratings to switch on — so the verdict that matters most hasn’t been delivered yet.
On Friday, November 13, Johnny Depp walks back into a major studio movie dressed as Scrooge. That the critics split right down the middle on him is, in a way, the most honest thing that could happen to a comeback like this. Nobody walks out indifferent, and that’s a lot more than anyone could have said about his career two years ago.
Frequently asked questions
When does Ebenezer come out?
Friday, November 13, 2026, in theaters in the United States and the United Kingdom, from Paramount Pictures.
How long is it, and what’s it rated?
It runs 116 minutes (1 hour 56 minutes) and is rated PG-13 for frightening material.
What’s its Rotten Tomatoes score?
As of this writing, Thursday, November 12, 2026 at 7:48 p.m. Central, it sits at 51% with 71 critic reviews. That number changes as more reviews arrive, so it’s not a final score. The audience score isn’t live yet.
Is it a horror movie?
Not exactly. It’s a gothic, dark take on A Christmas Carol with horror touches, from the director of the X trilogy. Rotten Tomatoes lists it as holiday, fantasy, comedy, and drama.
Is this Johnny Depp’s Hollywood comeback?
It’s his first leading role in a major studio film since Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald (2018). Since then he’d worked mostly in European independent film.
Where can I watch it?
In theaters only, for now. Paramount hasn’t announced a streaming date.
