Ti West's "Ebenezer," the PG-13 Scrooge picture starring Johnny Depp, opened Friday in 3,535 theaters, per Deadline, with a $20M+ opening weekend projected on a net $38M budget.
The comeback narrative has been running since Comic-Con, where Depp showed up in full Scrooge makeup for what the studio called a surprise method actor appearance and the convention reportedly erupted. That is the whole mechanism. A premiere is just a press conference with a projector, the reported $5M payday was the down payment, and the walk-on was the marketing budget. Nobody is surprised the movie is "healthy." They scheduled it to be.
The math is the real joke, and Variety is doing it out loud: $20M domestic plus $20M overseas, which is how you do Christmas arithmetic. 53% critics, 4.5 stars on PostTrak, 63% definite recommend. Critics have never been wild about Christmas anything, and the score that matters is the one from the family holding the gift card. This is not a Depp picture wearing a mustache. It is a family picture wearing a Depp. Deadline's own box office editor wrote that a $20M start is "surely no bah-humbug," which is the most honest sentence in the entire cycle.
The funniest part is what this greenlight says about the studio. Paramount's first big one under the new post-Skydance administration is a goose. New boss walks in, asks what we make, and the answer is: fattened, with Dolby.
YOUR TURN: Is $20M the start of a comeback, or just the price of a goose being a goose?
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