Johnny Depp's comeback is playing Scrooge — weeks after Patrick Stewart, the Scrooge of a generation, died

Ebenezer: A Christmas Carol reaches theaters on November 13 — Ti West's gothic take on Dickens from Paramount, with Johnny Depp as Scrooge, Ian McKellen as Marley's ghost, Rupert Grint as Bob Cratchit, and Andrea Riseborough, Tramell Tillman and Daisy Ridley as the three spirits. It's Depp's first wide studio release since Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald in 2018 — by any practical definition, the comeback.

Sixteen days before the premiere, Patrick Stewart died — the actor whose one-man Broadway A Christmas Carol in the early '90s and 1999 TNT film made his Scrooge the definitive one for a generation of viewers. The r/boxoffice thread on Ebenezer's prospects saw the collision coming:

"Regardless of its own merits (or lack thereof) the passing of Patrick Stewart is going to draw comparisons to his Scrooge-forward 1999 adaption. And I can't imagine they will be favorable. The ghost of Christmas past indeed."

Nobody at Paramount planned this; release dates lock months out, and Stewart's death was sudden. The collision is pure calendar.

Paramount dated Depp's Scrooge for sixteen days after the death of the actor whose Scrooge defined the role on screen.

The worst role for this particular comeback

A comeback vehicle is supposed to let audiences see the actor fresh. Scrooge does the opposite twice over. Every viewer now walks in with Stewart's freshly re-watched version in their head — the tribute articles and streaming spikes that follow an actor's death guarantee it — so Depp's performance will be read against a eulogized benchmark, not on its own terms.

And the role itself hands ammunition to anyone inclined to use it. Depp remains the most polarizing star in Hollywood after the Heard trial, and the thread got to the subtext immediately:

"Wild move to take a dude as controversial as Depp in 2026 and give him the role of Famous Asshole."

— a commenter on r/boxoffice

Redemption is the entire plot of A Christmas Carol, and Paramount is clearly betting the metaphor lands as poignant. The risk is that it lands as on-the-nose — a redemption arc marketed by a studio, starring an actor whose own arc half the audience refuses to grant.

Don't miss: Skydance owes us 30 movies a year. Its $87.5 billion debt says don't count on it

What the numbers say

Box Office Pro's long-range forecast puts the opening at $25 million to $35 million — respectable for a Christmas movie in mid-November, modest for a comeback narrative. For scale, Depp's last pre-trial wide releases opened at $62.1 million (Grindelwald, 2018) and $22.6 million (Black Mass, 2015). Test screenings have reportedly scored high, and Ti West's name carries real horror-adjacent cachet after the X trilogy.

So the math can work. The iconography is the harder fight: to own the role, Depp's Scrooge has to be different enough from the one audiences just spent two weeks mourning — and good enough that "different" doesn't read as "lesser."

Previously we wrote: Not Zuckerberg, not Trump, not Musk: The Social Reckoning's $9 million says we're done with billionaire movies