Ebenezer: A Christmas Carol News & Updates

The first trailer for Ebenezer: A Christmas Carol has landed, giving audiences a look at Johnny Depp as a bitterly grouchy, snowball-hurling Ebenezer Scrooge in director Ti West’s dark reimagining of the Charles Dickens classic, set for release on November 11, 2026.

Depp’s Scrooge is introduced not merely as a miserly skinflint but as a man actively venting his seasonal rage, with quick shots showing him pelting carolers with snowballs and barking at passersby in fog-choked London streets. The trailer, released Tuesday, leans into the film’s described tone - a “dark and haunting” take on the holiday tale - with sepia-tinted flashbacks, jump-scare apparitions, and a score that favors low, rumbling strings over jolly bells. “You ask me what I want for Christmas?” Depp’s Scrooge snarls at a trembling Bob Cratchit. “I want you to vanish.”

West, best known for the X horror trilogy and the 2022 slasher Pearl, has previously indicated that his version of A Christmas Carol would treat the ghost story elements with the same dread he applies to horror films. The trailer supports that promise: Ian McKellen’s Jacob Marley appears not as a clanking ghost but as a spectral figure wrapped in shadow, whispering warnings in a distorted voice. “My chains are forged by every deed I left undone,” Marley intones, as Scrooge recoils against his bedchamber wall.

The supporting cast includes Rupert Grint as the ever-optimistic Bob Cratchit, seen huddling with his family around a meager fire, and Andrea Riseborough as the Ghost of Christmas Past, whose face shifts between multiple expressions in a single frame. Tramell Tillman plays the Ghost of Christmas Present as a towering, almost menacing figure who offers Scrooge a glimpse of holiday joy that seems just out of reach. Sam Claflin and Charlie Murphy portray Scrooge’s nephew Fred and his wife, respectively, while Daisy Ridley also appears in an as-yet-unrevealed role.

What sets this trailer apart from past adaptations is its emphasis on Scrooge’s active cruelty. In a key beat, Depp’s character laughs mockingly at a charity collector before slamming his door and muttering, “Are there no prisons? Are there no workhouses?” The line, lifted from Dickens, carries a heavier weight here, delivered with a sneer rather than a simple dismissal. “We didn’t want to make a nice Scrooge,” West said in a statement accompanying the trailer’s release. “We wanted to make a man who is genuinely frightening in his isolation. His redemption has to feel earned, and that means starting from a very dark place.”

The trailer also showcases West’s visual style: narrow alleyways, flickering gaslights, and snow that seems to fall in unnatural patterns. One sequence cuts between a young Scrooge at a Christmas party - played by a different actor, credited simply as “Young Scrooge” - and the older Scrooge watching from across a street, his face half-lit by a lantern. Another shows Andrea Riseborough’s Ghost of Christmas Past extending a hand toward Scrooge, who hesitates before grasping it.

Johnny Depp’s casting has been a subject of industry speculation since it was announced in early 2025. The actor, whose recent filmography has been limited, arrives in Ebenezer with marked physical transformation: a gaunt frame, unkempt gray hair, and a scowl that rarely breaks. Early test screenings, according to production sources, have drawn comparisons to his work in Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street and The Professor, both roles that required him to inhabit characters on the edge of social collapse.

Rupert Grint, speaking to reporters earlier this month, described working opposite Depp as “electric” but noted that the set atmosphere was intentionally tense. “Ti wanted everyone to feel a little off-balance,” Grint said. “Johnny stays in character between takes - or at least in a version of Scrooge. It’s unsettling, but it makes the scenes where Cratchit stands up to him all the more powerful.”

Ebenezer: A Christmas Carol is being released in theaters on November 11, 2026, placing it squarely in the pre-holiday window. No runtime has been announced, and the film currently holds no rating on TMDb. The trailer, which runs two minutes and forty-five seconds, ends not with a jump scare or a laugh but with a single shot: Scrooge, standing alone in a snowy cemetery, looking at his own tombstone. He whispers, “Is that my future?” The screen cuts to black.

Whether the film will lean fully into horror or maintain the holiday spirit of redemption remains to be seen. But if the trailer is any indication, West’s Scrooge will have to claw his way back from a very cold place indeed.

Source: Variety