970x125
Johnny Depp gets swallowed by his own bed in the first trailer for Ebenezer: A Christmas Carol. Wes Craven pulled him into a mattress back in 1984, in his first screen role, and A Nightmare on Elm Street turned that bed into a geyser. More than forty years later, Ti West sends him back under. The shot lasts a second or two, easy to miss, and it says plenty about what kind of Christmas movie Paramount thinks it is selling.
Paramount dropped the footage Thursday as part of its San Diego Comic-Con push, one day after a first poster introduced Depp’s Scrooge under the tagline “The name you know. The story you don’t.” West directs from a script by Nathaniel Halpern, the creator of Outer Range, and the film reaches theaters on November 13, 2026. The official synopsis promises “a thrilling ghost story set in Dickens’ London, following one man’s supernatural journey to face his past, present and future as he fights for a second chance at redemption.”
Read that synopsis again. No heartwarming, no beloved, no cherished family tradition. Paramount is selling a ghost story, which happens to be what Dickens wrote in the first place.
What the trailer shows
Blood red text opens the trailer and reintroduces Depp as “the Master of Misfits,” a nod to four decades of oddballs, before he appears in period dress and delivers the line “It’s good to be back.” The London around him runs on two registers. By day it is a snow-covered postcard where Scrooge pelts passersby with snowballs, aimed at their heads, thrown with real spite. After dark the ghosts arrive and the postcard curls at the edges.
Andrea Riseborough’s Ghost of Christmas Past drifts through the footage as a pale spectral figure, closer to a Victorian seance photograph than the warm glowing guide most adaptations prefer. Ian McKellen’s Jacob Marley stays quiet and still while Depp’s Scrooge rages at him. The stillness is worse. And then the bed folds Scrooge into the dark, as if the house itself joined the haunting.
None of this looks like a rewrite. The beats packed into the 82 seconds are the ones every reader knows: the counting house, Bob Cratchit, the three spirits, an old man forced to watch his own life play back. What West has changed is the temperature. The marketing never uses the word horror, and the trailer does not need it to.
Depp himself plays it bigger than the gloom suggests. His Scrooge sneers and mutters through the daylight scenes, then reacts to the spirits with a wide-eyed panic that sits closer to his gothic oddball era than to a granite Victorian miser. It is his first lead in a major studio film in years, and Paramount clearly knows it, since the trailer spends its opening seconds reintroducing him. Whether the film can hold comedy and dread in the same frame is a November question.
A haunting needs the right landlord
West spent the X trilogy, meaning X, Pearl and MaXXXine, on period settings and on characters who wanted bigger lives and were ruined by the wanting. Pearl wanted the stage. Maxine wanted fame. Scrooge is the one who actually got everything he asked for, and Ebenezer is about the invoice arriving. A filmmaker who builds dread out of wallpaper, patience and silence now has a Victorian house, a guilty man and three spirits with unlimited access. That is not stunt hiring. It is a fit.
The supporting cast runs deep. Severance’s Tramell Tillman plays the Ghost of Christmas Present and Rupert Grint plays Bob Cratchit, alongside Daisy Ridley, Sam Claflin, Charlie Murphy, Arthur Conti and Ellie Bamber in roles Paramount has not fully detailed. Emma Watts produced, with Stephen Deuters and Jason Forman among the executive producers. The production began filming in London and Dublin this past January, a quick turnaround for a film this size.
Dickens got there first
Nobody is forcing horror onto this material. Dickens put it on the 1843 title page: A Christmas Carol. In Prose. Being a Ghost Story of Christmas. Marley walks in wearing chains he forged link by link. Spirits enter a locked home whenever they please. The final vision is a neglected grave with Scrooge’s own name on the stone. The warmer adaptations, including the ones with singing vegetables, have carried the story beautifully for decades, but they carry it by turning down the volume on the corpse at the center. West does not seem interested in the volume knob.
Ebenezer: A Christmas Carol opens in theaters on November 13, 2026.
So the floor is yours. Do you want a Christmas Carol that treats its ghosts like ghosts? And which version still owns the season for you: Sim, Scott, Murray, or the Muppets?
