What is the 2026 Ebenezer movie about? The director of X and Pearl took on A Christmas Carol — and kept it PG-13
Ti West has made a Christmas movie, and the ratings board found exactly one thing to warn parents about.
Ebenezer opened in theaters on November 13 from Paramount. It's Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol once again, written by Nathaniel Halpern (Legion) and directed by West, best known for the R-rated horror trilogy X, Pearl and MaXXXine. Johnny Depp plays Scrooge, his first Hollywood studio lead in years. The movie runs 1 hour 56 minutes.
What it's about
The bones are Dickens's. Ebenezer Scrooge, London's stingiest businessman, spends Christmas Eve alone and is visited by the ghost of his late business partner, Jacob Marley, and then by the spirits of Christmas Past, Present and Yet to Come. By morning, he's a different man.
The poster promises "The name you know. The story you don't." West is more modest about it: he told Entertainment Weekly his changes are "all very much in reverence of the text." The ones he did make all pull in the same direction.
What West changes
- Marley starts out alive — Dickens's first line is "Marley was dead: to begin with." West opens instead with Ian McKellen's Marley alive and trading barbs with Scrooge. "Marley is really kind of a [expletive] in the movie," West told Entertainment Weekly.
- London is worse — the streets are full of scammers faking disabilities, and the charity collectors spend donations on themselves. Scrooge's cynicism has evidence behind it.
- The bed fights back — at one point Scrooge gets pulled down into his own mattress.
The first two are about giving Scrooge a case. West wanted the audience on the hook with him, not just watching him.
"I don't really agree with him, but I know where he's coming from," West told Den of Geek.
The mattress is about Depp. His first movie was A Nightmare on Elm Street in 1984, where his character, Glen, gets sucked into his bed by Freddy Krueger. West and Halpern wrote the homage into early drafts with no idea who'd play Scrooge. Once Depp signed on, West offered to cut it. Depp's answer: "No, man, that's my first movie."
The ghosts and who plays them
West's spirits are drawn from John Leech's illustrations for the first edition of 1843, and they look it:
- Jacob Marley — Ian McKellen, deathly pale and draped in chains.
- The Ghost of Christmas Past — Andrea Riseborough, white, bald and in what looks like a wedding dress.
- The Ghost of Christmas Present — Tramell Tillman (Severance), sickly, short on patience, with an exposed ribcage that creatures leap out of.
- The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come — a tall, silent figure that towers over everyone else in the frame.
Tillman's ghost is less of a stretch than it sounds. In the book, the Ghost of Christmas Present lives for only one night, ages as it goes, and hides two starving children, Ignorance and Want, under its robe.
The living cast includes Rupert Grint as Bob Cratchit, Sam Claflin as Scrooge's nephew Fred and Arthur Conti as young Ebenezer, with Daisy Ridley, Charlie Murphy and Ellie Bamber also on board.
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How it ended up PG-13
West didn't take the job to tone down a ghost story. He took it because he thinks nobody had told it properly.
"I've always thought no one's really made the movie version where the ghosts are a little bit spooky," West told Entertainment Weekly.
His own scare came from the 1984 TV movie. "As a kid, I watched the George C. Scott version, and Marley really freaked me out," West told Den of Geek. He wanted to give kids that same feeling, and pitched it to the studio simply: "It's hard-PG."
The model, he said, was the kind of movie "you were allowed to watch as a kid but occasionally pushed it just a little too far." That describes 1984 well. That summer, Gremlins and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom pushed PG so far that the MPAA created the PG-13 rating.
Ebenezer landed in that rating with a single reason: "frightening material." There's no post-credits scene. In Canada, Alberta's film board went one step softer and rated it PG, with a note: not recommended for young children.
Previously we wrote: Birdman ending explained: Iñárritu shot a different ending, and it ended on Johnny Depp