SAN DIEGO — Victorian carolers were singing “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen” outside a mock Victorian storefront in San Diego’s Gaslamp Quarter when a figure appeared in an upstairs window. He wore a black cape, a battered top hat, a hooked nose prosthetic, and the particular scowl of a man who has spent a long time deciding what he thinks about all of this. Johnny Depp, in full character as Ebenezer Scrooge, studied the crowd below, then stepped into the street.
The first words spoken in the official trailer for Ebenezer, which Depp unveiled in Hall H at San Diego Comic-Con on July 25, are four: “It’s good to be back.”
The line is Scrooge’s. Whether anyone in that room took it as only Scrooge’s is another matter.
Ebenezer, directed by Ti West and distributed by Paramount Pictures, opens in theaters November 13 and represents the most significant Hollywood studio bet on Depp in nearly eight years. Warner Bros. had asked him to exit the Fantastic Beasts franchise in late 2020 following the British libel ruling in his case against The Sun. His 2022 defamation trial against Amber Heard in Fairfax County, Virginia, returned a jury verdict that largely favored Depp. What followed professionally was not an influx of studio offers but a period of careful repositioning: Depp starred in Maiwenn’s Jeanne du Barry, a French production that opened Cannes 2023 to significant press attention but limited commercial reach; he worked on smaller projects and his painting in Europe. Paramount and producer Emma Watts chose him for Ebenezer. That decision represents a different category of institutional confidence than an acquittal.
West, whose X trilogy established him as the most precise horror craftsman working in American genre cinema across X, Pearl, and MaXXXine, brings his aesthetic to a story the industry has typically packaged as warmly predictable. Paramount’s tagline for the film is pointed: “The name you know. The story you don’t.” The screenplay, written by Nathaniel Halpern, treats Charles Dickens’ 1843 novella as what Dickens always intended it to be. A ghost story. Not a parable with seasonal soft focus but a Victorian-era nightmare about the cost of a life spent choosing money over every other consideration.
The casting extends the premise’s credibility. Ian McKellen plays Jacob Marley, the dead business partner whose spectral warning opens the story; the authority McKellen brings to that register is a casting asset in its own right. Rupert Grint is Bob Cratchit. Andrea Riseborough, who has spent the past several years becoming one of the most interesting actors working outside the conventional studio system, plays the Ghost of Christmas Past. Tramell Tillman, whose contained menace in Severance was one of the breakout television performances of the streaming era, appears as the Ghost of Christmas Present. Daisy Ridley and Sam Claflin round out the ensemble as Emily and Fred, while Arthur Conti carries the young Ebenezer and Ellie Bamber appears as Isabel Fezziwig.
Principal photography ran through early 2026, on location in Dublin and at the Chatham Historic Dockyard in Kent, with cinematographer Checco Varese handling the visual grammar. Varese and West developed a particular period grain working together across the X films; the production scale here is considerably larger, though the instincts carrying over are the same.
The San Diego activation was built to operate at multiple registers simultaneously. The Gaslamp Quarter appearance, unannounced and in complete makeup, positioned the film as an event before the formal marketing had fully spoken. Depp never broke character on the street, fielding a crowd call of “Good day to you, Mr. Scrooge” with “What’s so good about it?” before disappearing. He then materialized at the end of an unrelated directors panel in Hall H to introduce the trailer. As The Hollywood Reporter noted, the street-level crowd response was immediate. The trailer accumulated more than 15 million YouTube views within 48 hours of the Hall H debut, according to the studio.
What the trailer establishes is primarily tone: West’s visual language pressed against the recognizable architecture of the Dickens story. Scrooge as miser, as haunted man, as something closer to horror protagonist than the seasonal archetype the character has largely become. Whether that equation holds over a full feature is a question November will answer. The trailer’s work was to make that question feel worth asking. In Hall H, it did.
Depp’s previous San Diego Comic-Con appearance was in July 2018, for Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald, a franchise he would exit two years later. That this return arrives through a Ti West ghost story rather than a franchise rehabilitation says something both about the nature of the opportunity available and the nature of the choice made. The studio carries real momentum into fall: Spider-Man: Brand New Day shattered seven years of China superhero box office records earlier this month, and Paramount’s appetite for major theatrical bets appears intact. Ebenezer occupies a different register, closer to a prestige winter release banking on a marquee name returning to studio form, a proven genre director, and 183 years of source material familiarity. What audiences make of all that when November 13 arrives is not something Hall H enthusiasm can answer in advance.
Ebenezer opens exclusively in theaters on November 13, 2026.
