Is Ebenezer: A Christmas Carol a prequel? Johnny Depp's Scrooge comes with a young Scrooge too
Paramount is selling Ebenezer as the story you don't know, which is a bold pitch for one of the most adapted stories in the English language.
Ebenezer: A Christmas Carol opens in theaters on November 13. Ti West, the director of X, Pearl and MaXXXine, made it from a script by Nathaniel Halpern. Johnny Depp plays Scrooge, in his first lead role for a major studio since his 2022 defamation trial, and the cast around him includes Ian McKellen as Jacob Marley, Rupert Grint as Bob Cratchit, Sam Claflin as Scrooge's nephew Fred, Andrea Riseborough as the Ghost of Christmas Past, Tramell Tillman as the Ghost of Christmas Present, and Daisy Ridley.
Is it a prequel?
No. Everything Paramount has shown points to a new adaptation of Dickens' 1843 novella, not a story set before it: Scrooge on Christmas Eve, Marley's ghost, then three spirits. West is giving it a darker, gothic, horror-tinged look, but the shape is the one Dickens wrote.
The marketing is what makes it sound like something else. The first teaser, shown at San Diego Comic-Con in July, ended on "The name you know, the story you don't," and the full trailer tells viewers who think they know Scrooge's story to think again.
Not everyone who watched it was convinced. Reviewing the trailer, the A.V. Club noted that it covers the familiar arc in about two minutes: "Maybe the story we've been told is actually just the story."
Where young Scrooge comes in
Arthur Conti, who played Jeremy, the boy Jenna Ortega's Astrid falls for in Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, plays young Ebenezer. He's not the hero of a separate origin story. He belongs to the Ghost of Christmas Past sequence, the part of the book where Scrooge is made to watch his own younger self.
In the novella, that stretch takes Scrooge back through a few stops:
- a lonely boy left at boarding school over the holidays
- an apprentice at Fezziwig's warehouse, dancing at the Christmas party
- a young man losing the woman he was going to marry, because he's come to love money more
That last scene belongs to Belle, Scrooge's fiancée. Belle isn't on the film's published cast list. Ellie Bamber plays a character called Isabel Fezziwig, a name Dickens never used.
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How much young Scrooge you get
Young Scrooge is a flashback role, and the Christmas Past sequence is one of the three spirits' visits. If you were hoping the young version of the character would carry a whole movie, this isn't that movie.
Ebenezer opens in theaters November 13, six weeks before Christmas.
Previously we wrote: Before Picard, Patrick Stewart played a firefighter on Coronation Street — in his own Yorkshire accent