Ebenezer
Bah, Humbug Never Looked This Good (Or This Haunted)
Forget everything cozy you remember about A Christmas Carol. Paramount just dropped the first trailer for “Ebenezer,” and it turns out the ghost of Christmas Past isn’t the only thing that got a glow-up, the whole story got a horror-movie makeover, and honestly? We’re here for it.
Unveiled during a surprise Comic-Con crash-out (more on that chaos below), the trailer confirms what everyone’s been whispering since casting news broke: this is not your grandmother’s Dickens adaptation. This is Scrooge by way of a haunted house you’d actually be scared to walk through.
Wait, Johnny Depp Is Playing… Scrooge?
Yes. That Johnny Depp. In his first major Hollywood studio leading role since his 2022 defamation trial against ex-wife Amber Heard (he’s popped up in smaller films like Jeanne du Barry and Day Drinker since then, but this is the big studio comeback), Depp is stepping back into a leading role, and he picked possibly the most miserly, unlikeable literary character of all time to do it with. Bold strategy.
Depp doesn’t just show up in the trailer, he showed up in character on the streets of San Diego’s Gaslamp Quarter before crashing a Comic-Con Hall H panel dressed head-to-toe as the crotchety old moneylender himself. Somewhere, a marketing executive is framing that moment and hanging it on their office wall.
So What’s Actually Different Here?
The bones of the story are all present and accounted for: Scrooge hates Christmas, three spirits show up to fix that, redemption ensues. Classic stuff. But the trailer’s tagline – “The name you know. The story you don’t.”, is doing some heavy lifting, and it’s not just marketing fluff.
Here’s what’s setting this version apart:
1. It’s directed by a horror guy. Ti West, the filmmaker behind unsettling horror hits, is at the helm here. If you were expecting warm lighting and gentle bell-jingling, brace yourself, this Christmas Carol leans into “ghost story” a lot harder than “holiday special.”
2. The Ghost of Christmas Past looks like she wandered out of a nightmare. The trailer frames Andrea Riseborough’s Ghost of Christmas Past as far more unsettling than the friendly-candle-flame version most adaptations give us. Consider this your fair warning before family movie night.
3. The marketing is teasing new territory. The tagline “The name you know. The story you don’t” suggests screenwriter Nathaniel Halpern’s script may expand on Scrooge’s history beyond what Dickens wrote, though the specifics haven’t been confirmed by the studio yet. What that means exactly remains a mystery the trailer is happy to dangle in front of us like a Christmas ornament just out of reach.
4. The cast is stacked and doing double duty. Ian McKellen plays Jacob Marley (yes, the chain-rattling one), Rupert Grint is Bob Cratchit, Sam Claflin plays Fred, Tramell Tillman takes on the Ghost of Christmas Present, and Arthur Conti plays a younger version of Scrooge. Daisy Ridley pulls double duty as both Emily Cratchit and the ominous, silent Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come, while Charlie Murphy, Henry Lloyd-Hughes, and Ellie Bamber round out what is, frankly, an overqualified ensemble for a two-minute trailer.
5. Depp is being marketed as “The Master of Misfits.” Which, considering his filmography, tracks.
The Plot, In Case You Slept Through English Class
For anyone who needs the refresher: a miserable, penny-pinching old man is visited by the ghost of his former business partner and three spirits representing his past, present, and future, all in an effort to scare him into becoming a decent human being before Christmas morning. It’s basically an intervention, except the intervention specialists are all dead and one of them floats.
When Can You See It?
Mark your calendars: “Ebenezer” hits theaters exclusively on November 13, 2026, courtesy of Paramount Pictures, conveniently timed to get you thoroughly spooked well before you’ve even finished your Thanksgiving leftovers.
Our Take
Turning A Christmas Carol into a horror-adjacent fever dream is either a genuinely inspired idea or an incredibly expensive gamble, possibly both. Dickens’ original story has always had a spooky streak (there are literally three ghosts and a corpse in chains), so leaning into that isn’t as much of a stretch as it sounds. The real test will be whether Ti West and company can still land the story’s warm, redemptive ending after spending ninety minutes making Scrooge and the audience sweat.
One thing’s for sure: this is the most anyone has talked about a Charles Dickens adaptation in years, and Johnny Depp showing up in character at Comic-Con guaranteed it would be the internet’s problem for at least a week.
Will you be lining up for “Ebenezer” this November, or are you team “leave Scrooge alone”? Sound off in the comments.
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