Paramount's Johnny Depp comeback gets a Christmas theatrical push. Its Avatar: The Last Airbender movie didn't

Next Friday, November 13, Paramount opens Ebenezer worldwide — Ti West's gothic A Christmas Carol with Johnny Depp as Scrooge, Boxoffice Pro tracking a $25–35 million start against a $38 million budget. It's Depp's first wide-release lead since 2018, and the campaign has been a full-dress studio operation: first footage at CinemaCon in April, a surprise Comic-Con appearance in Scrooge costume) with a Hall H trailer introduction, Ian McKellen and Rupert Grint in support, and a tagline — "The name you know, the story you don't" — stamped on every poster.

Four months before that, the same studio quietly uploaded Avatar Aang: The Last Airbender to Paramount+. The animated continuation of one of the most beloved series of this century was dated for theaters on October 9, then stripped of its theatrical release and streamed on July 25, months early, after the film leaked online. Director Lauren Montgomery said the quiet part on Instagram in March: the movie "deserves to be seen on a big screen!!!" — and, she insisted, the streaming move said nothing about its quality.

The Aang director spent March asking for a big screen. Depp spent July in a Scrooge costume in Hall H.

What the studio is actually betting on

Put the two decisions side by side and Paramount's theory of theatrical value gets uncomfortably clear. A 63-year-old star's rehabilitation vehicle, adapting a novella that has been filmed well over a hundred times, is worth a global release and a six-month campaign. A franchise with a generation of fans who grew up on it — fans who buy tickets precisely for event-scale animation — is worth a content drop. One r/boxoffice commenter made the comparison out loud:

"All this effort for a washed up has been, yet they can't give the Avatar: Last Airbender movie a real theatrical release."

I'd put it less cruelly than "has been," because the Depp bet will probably work — test screenings reportedly scored high, the trailer plays, and $25 million clears this budget's bar easily. The sting is in the opportunity cost, not the arithmetic.

The real risk isn't Depp

The audience settled its Depp question a while ago; the campaign's crowds and the tracking both say so. The weak point is the material, and the marketing knows it — that's what "the story you don't know" is trying to inoculate against. The trailer promise didn't survive contact with viewers:

"The most cringe part is where a trailer said 'you don't know the real story' and then proceeds to show scenes that have been shown in every other film adaptation."

That's the whole gamble in one sentence. Scrooge, Marley, the three ghosts, redemption by dawn — there is no untold version, only a darker grade.

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If Ebenezer opens big, it proves Depp still sells. If it stalls, the lesson won't be that audiences held a grudge — it will be that no amount of comeback machinery makes the 150th Christmas Carol an event. Scrooge, not the trial, is the risk Paramount chose over Aang.

Previously we wrote: Roku users are already seeing Jesse Watters ads, and the Fox deal just closed