In the fog-choked alleys of Victorian London, where gas lamps flicker like dying embers and the chill wind carries whispers of regret, Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol has long been a beacon of redemption—a miserly soul’s nocturnal odyssey through the specters of memory, morality, and mortality. But as Hollywood’s Yuletide machine churns out yet another adaptation, this holiday season promises something far more sinister: a psychological descent into the abyss, helmed by horror maestro Ti West and starring a resurrected icon, Johnny Depp. Ebenezer: A Christmas Carol, slated for a November 13, 2026, release from Paramount Pictures, reimagines Dickens’ novella as a “thrilling ghost story” laced with dread and delirium, where the ghosts aren’t benevolent guides but relentless tormentors peeling back the layers of a fractured psyche. Depp, 62, steps into the tattered coat of Ebenezer Scrooge, marking his grandest studio return since the tempests of his 2022 defamation saga. With West—fresh off his blood-soaked X trilogy—directing from a script by Nathaniel Halpern, and an ensemble boasting Ian McKellen, Andrea Riseborough, and Tramell Tillman, this isn’t your grandma’s feel-good fable. It’s a descent into the miser’s madness, where “Bah! Humbug!” echoes like a curse, and the chains of avarice drag deeper than any White Walker frost. As production ramps up in London’s shadowed corners, the film arrives not just as seasonal fare, but as a mirror to Depp’s own haunted revival—timely, twisted, and tantalizingly terrifying.

The announcement landed like a spectral visitation in late October 2025, mere weeks before Thanksgiving, when Paramount—fresh from its Skydance merger under David Ellison’s ambitious helm—snapped up the package in a flurry of final negotiations. Depp, whose post-trial odyssey has meandered through indie curios like Jeanne du Barry (2023) and the French arthouse whimsy of Modi (2024), embodies Scrooge with the kind of eccentric gravitas that once defined his Pirates era. No longer the swashbuckling Jack Sparrow or the whimsically wicked Mad Hatter, Depp channels a Scrooge unmoored: a gaunt, glowering financier whose ledgers aren’t just balanced in ink, but stained with the blood of forgotten debts—both financial and familial. “This Scrooge isn’t redeemed by a tidy epiphany,” Halpern teased in a rare script peek during a London Film Festival panel. “He’s clawed back from the brink, his ghosts less harbingers of hope and more excavators of buried trauma.” The script, a taut 120-page fever dream, amplifies Dickens’ supernatural spine: Jacob Marley’s rattling chains manifest as auditory hallucinations that blur with Scrooge’s gin-soaked reveries, while the Ghost of Christmas Past isn’t a ethereal child but a doppelganger of Scrooge’s long-dead sister Fan, her porcelain face cracking like fault lines under scrutiny.

West’s vision elevates the tale from festive frolic to psychological horror, a pivot that feels organic for the Delaware-born auteur whose career has been a scalpel to the American underbelly. Best known for his Mia Goth-starring slashers—X (2022)’s porn-set paranoia, Pearl (2022)’s blood-and-bubbles frenzy, and MaXXXine (2024)’s Sunset Strip slaughter—West brings a gothic restraint to Ebenezer, trading jump scares for creeping unease. “Dickens wrote a ghost story first, moral fable second,” West explained in a Sight & Sound interview, his wiry frame hunched over a Victorian ledger prop. “I’m leaning into the phantasmagoria—the way Scrooge’s mind fractures under the weight of his greed. It’s less It’s a Wonderful Life, more The Turn of the Screw.” Filming kicks off in January 2026 across London’s fogbound East End—standing sets at Shepperton Studios evoking the novella’s labyrinthine streets—and Wales’ brooding valleys for the spectral visions. Cinematographer Eric Gautier (Into the Wild) lenses in desaturated sepia tones, gaslight flares casting elongated shadows that swallow Scrooge whole, while composer Cliff Martinez (The Neon Demon) scores with dissonant strings and tolling bells that mimic a heartbeat in arrhythmia. Budgeted at a lean $80 million—modest for a period piece with VFX ghosts—Paramount eyes a mid-November slot to capture holiday dollars, pitting it against a Blumhouse chiller and Lionsgate’s Hunger Games prequel.

Depp’s Scrooge is the film’s fractured fulcrum, a performance poised to exorcise his own career demons. Absent from major studio spotlights since Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald (2018) and the fallout of his high-profile trial—where a jury vindicated him against Amber Heard’s allegations, leading to a 2022 settlement—Depp has navigated a wilderness of European indies and music jaunts with the Hollywood Vampires. Yet, whispers of a Pirates 6 linger, and Ebenezer feels like a bridge: Depp’s innate quirkiness—those kohl-rimmed eyes, the perpetual half-smirk—twisted into Scrooge’s snarling isolation. On set leaks (hastily quashed by publicists), Depp arrives in full period garb: threadbare greatcoat, fingerless gloves clutching a quill like a dagger, his voice a raspy Cockney growl honed from months with dialect coach Carolyn Allen. “Johnny’s Scrooge is a man who’s built walls of gold around a void,” West shared during a craft-services huddle, praising Depp’s improvisational flair—ad-libbing a hallucinatory monologue where Scrooge barters with his own shadow for Tiny Tim’s cure. Off-camera, Depp’s a gentle haunt: mentoring young extras with pirate yarns, sketching ghost designs in the margins of his script. For a man who’s danced with madness in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Sweeney Todd, Scrooge’s arc—from avaricious automaton to awakened penitent—mirrors Depp’s own quest for absolution, his post-trial philanthropy (donations to children’s hospitals via his Aquavella foundation) echoing the miser’s belated benevolence.

Flanking Depp is a cast that crackles with pedigree and promise. Andrea Riseborough, the chameleonic Brit whose Oscar-nominated turn in To Leslie (2022) proved her mastery of quiet devastation, slips into the role of Mrs. Dilber, Scrooge’s long-suffering housekeeper. No simpering sidekick, Riseborough’s Dilber is a spectral confidante, her knowing glances hinting at shared secrets from Scrooge’s shadowed youth—perhaps a forbidden dalliance or a buried complicity in Marley’s slave-trade dealings. “Andrea brings a steel spine to the domestic,” Halpern noted, her wardrobe of patched woolens and wire-rimmed spectacles a far cry from her Oblivion glamour. Ian McKellen, 86 and luminous as ever, materializes as the Ghost of Christmas Present—a boisterous, bellowing spirit whose jolly facade masks a grim reaper’s edge, his flowing robes concealing scythe-like shadows. Fresh from The Critic (2025), McKellen infuses the role with Gandalf-esque gravitas laced with queer-coded subversion: the Present’s feast a bacchanal of forbidden desires, challenging Scrooge’s repressed longings. “Ian’s ghost is the id unleashed—feast or famine,” West quipped, their rehearsal chemistry sparking rumors of an unscripted monologue where Present toasts to “the sins we sup on in silence.”

Tramell Tillman, the Emmy-winning force from Apple’s Severance (2025), embodies the Ghost of Christmas Present in a dual casting twist—wait, no, sources confirm Tillman as the Present, his towering frame and baritone thunder evoking a spectral Santa with a scowl. Tillman’s arc peaks in a hallucinatory banquet scene, where he force-feeds Scrooge visions of Cratchit family strife, his eyes—cold as coal—betraying the ghost’s own tragic backstory: a former debtor damned to eternal revelry. “Tramell’s presence is seismic,” Riseborough gushed in a Vanity Fair profile, her praise underscoring the ensemble’s off-screen camaraderie—impromptu Dickens readings over pub pints, McKellen regaling with Lord of the Rings war stories. Supporting shadows include Dexter Fletcher as a lecherous Fezziwig, whose holiday revels hide predatory undercurrents, and a breakout young Bob Cratchit played by rising star Kit Connor (Heartstopper), his Tim a poignant foil to Scrooge’s callousness. Marley? A gravel-voiced cameo from West’s muse, Mia Goth, her chains forged from ledger pages that rustle like whispers of the damned.

What sets Ebenezer apart in the novella’s bloated canon—over 100 adaptations, from Alastair Sim’s 1951 gold standard to the Muppet madness of 1992—is its unflinching psychological core. Dickens penned A Christmas Carol in 1843 amid personal penury, his own father’s debtor’s prison haunting the prose; West amplifies this into a study of avarice as mental malady, Scrooge’s visitations less moral theater than dissociative episodes triggered by laudanum-laced nightmares. Halpern, whose Legion bent superheroics into schizophrenia, weaves in Freudian flourishes: the Past as repressed trauma (a Dickensian nod to Fan’s early death), the Future a dystopian London of workhouses aflame. VFX from Framestore (Gravity) render ghosts as manifestations of Scrooge’s unraveling—ethereal figures glitching like faulty phonographs, their forms dissolving into inkblots of regret. The climax, a fevered confrontation atop a frozen Thames, trades sleigh rides for a spectral chase through fog-bound crypts, Scrooge’s redemption not a tidy bow but a fragile truce with his demons.

Production buzz swirls like London pea-soupers: West, 45, eyes Ebenezer as his studio breakout, blending A24 intimacy with Paramount polish—practical fog machines mingling with AR overlays for ghostly superimpositions. Depp, prepping with a deep dive into Dickens’ letters (loaned from the British Library), hints at musical flourishes: a hummed “God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen” twisted into a dirge. Paramount’s November slot—sandwiched between holiday heavy-hitters—positions it for awards chatter, its darker timbre a counterpoint to the feel-good deluge. Early test screenings (whispered, embargoed) rave: “Depp’s Scrooge chills deeper than any Polar Express,” one exec allegedly texted. Yet, shadows linger: Depp’s lingering tabloid aura, West’s genre baggage—will audiences embrace a Scrooge who snarls more than sobs?

As November 2025’s frost bites, Ebenezer beckons like Marley’s knocker—thrice-rapped, insistent. In a year of reboots and reckonings, this adaptation doesn’t just haunt; it heals, offering Depp a mirror to his own ghosts and West a canvas for his creeping dread. Will Scrooge’s chains shatter, or forge anew? Come 2026, as carolers croon and chestnuts roast, the answer emerges from the gloom: a tale as timeless as it is terrifying, where even misers might find their merry. Bah! Indeed—but with a wink, and a whisper of what’s to come.