Snow, a black top hat, and a pale-faced visitor with a warning everyone knows: you will be visited by three ghosts. That is the opening of the second trailer for Ebenezer, Ti West’s take on Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, with Johnny Depp as Scrooge. Paramount Pictures put it out in the first days of October 2026, and the film reaches theatres on November 13.
The studio’s tagline says it all: “The name you know, the story you don’t.” Red title cards in the clip dare viewers who think they know how it goes. Depp’s miser walks through Victorian London, brushes off men collecting for charity and goes home to a dark house. Later the trailer shows him haunted by ghosts, and in one shot facing the prospect of being buried alive. Very little of the plot is given away.
A director who likes the eerie side
West is best known for the horror films X, Pearl and MaXXXine. He told Entertainment Weekly he rereads the novel every year and finds it rather eerie. “I liked it more as a ghost story than as a Christmas story,” he said. He insists the film stays loyal to Dickens. He and screenwriter Nathaniel Halpern added moral ambiguity, so that Scrooge makes valid arguments even as he heads toward his change of heart. West also praised Depp’s grasp of Dickensian language and his knack for adding humour and charm to a man who is not particularly likeable.
The cast is deep. Rupert Grint plays Bob Cratchit, Scrooge’s exhausted secretary, whom West calls one of the emotional cores of the film. Ian McKellen, 87, is Jacob Marley, and said his work took six days. Andrea Riseborough is the Ghost of Christmas Past, and Tramell Tillman of Severance plays the Ghost of Christmas Present, a spirit West describes as having little patience with Scrooge. Daisy Ridley plays Emily Cratchit, Sam Claflin is Fred, Scrooge’s nephew, and Arthur Conti plays the young Ebenezer. Ellie Bamber, Henry Lloyd-Hughes and Charlie Murphy complete the list.
Depp’s return
Yahoo, in its coverage, calls the film Depp’s return to a major Hollywood studio production in eight years. Mathrubhumi English notes that he has not been in a studio film since Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald in 2018. He was then dropped from the franchise, and The Secrets of Dumbledore came out in 2022 without him. His legal fight with former wife Amber Heard went through a 2022 US defamation trial, where a jury awarded Depp $10 million in compensatory damages and $5 million in punitive damages. Heard was awarded $2 million in compensatory damages.
The first trailer arrived in July, after Depp introduced the film at Hall H at the fan convention in San Diego. It ended with Scrooge saying, “It’s good to be back.” Filming took place in Dublin and London in January. Depp’s next screen role is in Day Drinker, a Lionsgate thriller with Madelyn Cline and Penélope Cruz, set for March 2027.
Sources
- Johnny Depp’s ‘Ebenezer’ trailer is here: ‘A Christmas Carol’ gets a chilling horror twist | Mathrubhumi English
- Johnny Depp’s Scrooge Looks Genuinely Terrifying in the New ‘Ebenezer’ Trailer
