Paramount dropped the first full trailer for "Ebenezer" on Thursday, a Ti West "supernatural revenge thriller" adaptation of "A Christmas Carol" with Johnny Depp as Scrooge, per The Hollywood Reporter.
The marketing did not pick a role, it picked a plot. The whole Western canon has exactly one story about a rich old man who gets haunted into being a decent person, and the comeback machine found it, bought the rights, and cast the lead in the mirror. Deadline's trailer post notes the opening credits roll through the alter egos, Sparrow to Scissorhands, "that led to this." The trailer is not selling a Dickens adaptation. It is selling the timeline.
The trailer even says it in character: Scrooge turns to camera and beams, "It's good to be back." That is not a line from Dickens. That is a press release wearing the hat. And the pitch to the horror crowd is a Christmas Carol as a "supernatural revenge thriller" with zombie-like creatures, because a miser having a bad night in November needs a genre tag that does not involve carols.
The calendar does the rest. Trial, Cannes return, CinemaCon, a fake 1880s village in the Gaslamp district with the lead wandering the street in a nose prosthetic per Deadline's account of the stunt, then the full trailer, then a November 13 release. The studio calls it his first mainstream Hollywood gig since 2018, and the trailer is built around that sentence. Three ghosts, three comebacks, one settlement.
YOUR TURN: When the role and the rehab are the same story, who is redeeming whom?
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