Johnny Depp's Haunting Scrooge Debuts in New Ebenezer Trailer

Johnny Depp is about to wish you a scary Christmas. The new Ebenezer trailer, released by Paramount on Thursday, shows the actor sinking into the role of literature's most famous miser in a version that feels nothing like the cozy holiday story most of us grew up watching. The full preview for Ebenezer, horror director Ti West's dark retelling of A Christmas Carol, leans hard into the tale's ghost-story roots, with Depp's Scrooge confronted by genuinely frightening apparitions and, at one point, buried alive on screen. The film opens in theaters on November 13, 2026, and it marks the actor's first major studio film in eight years.

According to FirstShowing, the second official trailer runs just over two and a half minutes and is a clear step up from the initial teaser, finally introducing the three ghosts and the gothic atmosphere West brings to Dickens' London. The full preview dropped through Paramount's official channels on October 1, 2026, and it wastes no time showing what West intends to do with the material. Snowy Victorian streets, charity collectors, ledgers and cold counting-house rooms set the scene, and then the lights go down and the horror takes over.

A comeback eight years in the making

For Depp, Ebenezer is a significant return. The film is his first project from a major studio since 2018's Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald, and his first big Hollywood role since his widely publicized 2022 trial. Paramount clearly believes in the pairing of star and story: the studio had Depp introduce the first teaser at San Diego Comic-Con in character as Scrooge, a move that signaled how seriously the production is taking both the performance and the film's tone.

The actor is reportedly following Ebenezer with Day Drinker, a Lionsgate thriller co-starring Penélope Cruz and Madelyn Cline that is scheduled for March 2027, according to Hypebeast's coverage of the trailer news. Hypebeast reports that the new footage leans into West's horror aesthetic, showing Depp's Scrooge facing terrifying spectral apparitions alongside a harrowing sequence in which he is buried alive.

Ti West's horror fingerprints are all over it

West is best known for his modern horror trilogy, the run of films that made him one of the most distinctive genre voices working today. The studio's logline for the project is short and pointed: "The name you know, the story you don't." That tagline is doing a lot of heavy lifting, promising a reinvention of one of the most adapted stories ever told while the trailer itself plays surprisingly close to the familiar beats — Marley's chains, the three spirits, the Cratchits, the graveyard, the redemption.

The ensemble around Depp is stacked. Ian McKellen plays Jacob Marley, with Rupert Grint and Daisy Ridley appearing as Bob and Emily Cratchit, Sam Claflin as nephew Fred, and Andrea Riseborough, Tramell Tillman, Ellie Bamber, Arthur Conti, Henry Lloyd-Hughes and Charlie Murphy filling out the cast. The film is written by Nathaniel Halpern, known for Tales From the Loop and Legion, and produced by Emma Watts. For more on what is coming to the big screen this season, see the Movies section.

Why Gen Z should care about a haunted Christmas

Holiday horror is quietly having a moment, and Ebenezer fits neatly into a tradition that runs from Scrooged to the recent wave of genre films treating familiar stories as horror vehicles. A Christmas ghost story makes sense for the season: October is when horror dominates the box office, and a Dickens adaptation with real scares could play to both the Halloween crowd and the December holiday audience. If you are tracking this year's scary season, this is one to put on the calendar — and for a look at this fall's other horror offerings, check out why Other Mommy could be this fall's scariest original horror.

Not everyone is sold on the reinvention angle, though. Some critics have noted that the new Ebenezer trailer, for all its gothic atmosphere, follows the classic story's structure quite closely, which raises a fair question: how much of a reimagining can this be when every iconic beat is already in the marketing? It is a reasonable skepticism. Still, West's track record suggests the scares will be genuine, and Depp appears to be having fun playing a miserable man — a combination that could give the film a life beyond the Christmas-release window.