Dickens subtitled it “a Ghost Story of Christmas”, and then spent the next hundred and eighty-odd years watching everyone turn it into a singalong with puppets. Ti West, the director of X, Pearl and MaXXXine, has decided to take the subtitle at its word. Ebenezer opens in cinemas on 13 November, with Johnny Depp as Scrooge, and the early footage suggests the chimney corner is a good deal colder than usual.
Paramount has been releasing it in instalments: a teaser at San Diego Comic-Con in July, where Depp turned up in character as Scrooge, and a longer trailer at the start of October. Both promise the familiar beats under the tagline “The name you know. The story you don’t”, with spectral figures, Ian McKellen in chains as Marley and, if one report is right, a bloody wink at Depp’s own screen debut in A Nightmare on Elm Street.
The supporting cast makes a Christmas film look unfairly well-staffed: Andrea Riseborough as the Ghost of Christmas Past, Tramell Tillman as the Ghost of Christmas Present, Daisy Ridley as the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come, Rupert Grint as Bob Cratchit, Sam Claflin as Fred, Charlie Murphy and Ellie Bamber as the Fezziwigs and Arthur Conti as the young Ebenezer, from a script by Nathaniel Halpern. Ridley, who also leads Paramount+’s Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, is clearly in the market for anything involving the dead or the deep.
The Christmas ghost story is a British institution. The BBC once scheduled M. R. James on the telly at bedtime, and it did more for the nation’s feelings about empty armchairs than a hundred carol services. The best screen Scrooges have remembered that there is a ghost story in there somewhere, Alastair Sim’s in 1951 above all, while Albert Finney’s musical and The Muppet Christmas Carol, the definitive version and not up for debate in this pub, found other ways to be memorable. There may be competition on the way: Robert Eggers has been reported to be making his own version for Warner Bros., with Willem Dafoe as Scrooge, which would make this a proper gothic Scrooge war.
Depp is playing his first major studio lead since 2018’s Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald, and reviewers of the trailers have him seeming to enjoy himself, which is more than can be said for the miser. Whether audiences take to a Scrooge with horror-film make-up will be settled at the box office from 13 November.
Dickens meant the story to frighten people into decency. After a century of mince pies and Muppets, it may take the man who made The House of the Devil to put the fear back in.
Join the conversation (0)