Johnny Depp’s Ebenezer First Reactions Are In — Critics Call His Scrooge a ‘Fiendish Delight’ (and a Few Aren’t Buying It)

Johnny Depp is back on the big screen in a big way — and the first people to see his new movie have plenty to say about it.

The early reactions to Ebenezer, Ti West’s dark and gothic spin on Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, landed on Tuesday, and they paint a picture that’s mostly glowing, with a few sharp notes of doubt tucked in around the edges. Depp, 63, plays Ebenezer Scrooge himself, and for a lot of the critics who caught an early screening, he is the whole reason the film works.

The movie opens in theaters this Friday, November 13, and it carries a weight that has very little to do with Christmas ghosts. This is Depp’s return to a major Hollywood studio production — his first since the defamation trial against ex-wife Amber Heard in 2022 turned his career into a courtroom drama of its own. Four years on, the question hanging over Ebenezer isn’t really whether audiences remember Scrooge’s story. It’s whether they’re ready to welcome Depp back.

If the first reactions are anything to go by, a good chunk of them are.

The praise: “a fiendish delight” and a “strong comeback vehicle”

The warmest words came from critics who seemed genuinely surprised by how much they enjoyed themselves. Tom Chatalbash of FilmSpeak called the film a “wickedly fun holiday treat and strong comeback vehicle for its star,” and he saved his best line for Depp himself, describing the actor’s Scrooge as a “fiendish delight.” That’s not faint praise. That’s a critic having fun.

Chatalbash also singled out the atmosphere Ti West builds around the story — the gothic shadows, the cold, the creeping sense that something is very wrong in Scrooge’s London long before any ghost shows up to make the point. West made his name with horror films like X and Pearl, and it turns out that skill set fits Dickens rather well. A Christmas ghost story was always a horror story if you squinted at it the right way, and West, apparently, squints very well.

Phil Roberts was similarly won over, calling Depp “magnetic” and pointing to the emotional punch of Scrooge’s redemption — the part of the story that has to land or the whole thing falls apart. You can dress up the ghosts and fog up the streets all you like, but if the audience doesn’t feel something when Scrooge finally cracks open, you’ve just made a very expensive costume drama.

Clarence Moye, a Critics Choice member, called the movie a “pleasant surprise,” and again the praise circled back to two things: the gothic visual style and Depp’s performance. The HoloFiles went further, putting Depp’s Scrooge in the same conversation as Alastair Sim and Michael Caine — the two performances that tend to top every “best Scrooge ever” list. That’s a big swing. Whether you agree with it or not, it tells you the kind of night the film’s supporters think they had.

The HoloFiles also had kind words for Tramell Tillman, who plays the Ghost of Christmas Present, calling him a “scene-stealer.” Tillman has been one of the most interesting actors working in television over the last few years, and a role like this — big, warm, strange, a little terrifying — feels like exactly the kind of part that lets him show off.

And then there was Jimmy O, writing for JoBlo, who walked in as a skeptic. He admitted he wasn’t excited about yet another adaptation of A Christmas Carol, which is a fair position — there are, conservatively, about a thousand of them. But he came out impressed by the film’s darker approach and by Depp, calling it “my favorite Depp performance in a few years.” When the skeptics start converting, that’s usually a good sign.

The doubts: do we really need another Scrooge?

Not everyone left the screening ready to hang a wreath on it, though. The split in the reactions isn’t really about whether the film is well made. It’s about whether it needed to exist at all — and whether Depp is the right man to carry it.

DawsOnScreen liked plenty of what he saw — West’s direction, the performances — but he couldn’t shake the feeling that the story is “incredibly well worn territory.” His read was blunt: the movie “serves more as a way to get Johnny Depp back into the mainstream.” That’s not a review of the film so much as a review of the film’s reason for being, and it’s the kind of criticism that’s hard to argue with and even harder to shake off. Every Depp project from here on out will carry that question with it, fair or not.

Ren Vieira praised the production and the sound design — the craft, in other words — but argued that “nothing’s distinct or unique” about this adaptation. It’s a polite way of saying the movie is good at being a Christmas movie and not much else.

Robert Ortiz was harsher still, finding the film “forgettable and just boring” and suggesting it doesn’t do enough to justify another trip through Dickens’ London. And Nick Spake, while praising several elements of the movie, landed his criticism squarely on the star, writing that there’s “one aspect that doesn’t work, though, and unfortunately, it’s Johnny Depp’s performance.”

So there it is: the full spread. One critic’s “fiendish delight” is another’s deal-breaker. That’s more or less what a first-reactions wave is supposed to look like, honestly. If everyone agreed, you’d suspect they’d all seen a different movie — or the same press release.

A comeback four years in the making

Whatever the reviews say when the embargo lifts on Thursday, November 12, Ebenezer is already a significant moment for Depp. Since the 2022 trial, his screen work has mostly lived in European productions and independent films — projects like Jeanne du Barry, which opened the Cannes Film Festival in 2023, and Modi, his directorial effort. Those kept him working, but they kept him at arm’s length from the Hollywood machine that made him one of the biggest movie stars on the planet.

Ebenezer changes that. It’s a Paramount Pictures release, a studio Christmas movie with a real marketing push and a prime November release date. The London premiere earlier this week — where Depp reunited on the red carpet with co-star Rupert Grint — had the feel of a proper event, not a quiet comeback. He looked relaxed, almost relieved, posing for photographers in Leicester Square like a man who knows the hard part might finally be behind him.

That’s a lot of pressure to put on a retelling of a story everyone already knows by heart. But it’s also, in a strange way, a smart choice. Scrooge is a character defined by his past, haunted by it, and given one last chance to change. You don’t need to be a film critic to see why that story might appeal to an actor at this particular point in his life. Whether the parallel is intentional or just good casting, it’s doing a lot of the movie’s marketing work for free.

The cast around him is stacked

Depp may be the headline, but he’s far from the only reason to pay attention to this cast. Rupert Grint — who knows a thing or two about growing up inside a franchise — plays Bob Cratchit, Scrooge’s long-suffering clerk. Andrea Riseborough takes on the Ghost of Christmas Past, and Ian McKellen, no less, plays Jacob Marley, the chained ghost who kicks the whole nightmare off.

Sam Claflin, Daisy Ridley, Ellie Bamber and Arthur Conti round out the ensemble, and if the early reactions are right, Tillman’s Ghost of Christmas Present might end up stealing scenes from all of them. It’s a cast that reads like someone went through a list of “actors who are always good” and just started making calls.

And the timing, from a box office point of view, is hard to beat. A dark Christmas movie arriving the week before Thanksgiving, when families are starting to think about holiday viewing and the multiplexes are filling up with seasonal fare, has a clear lane. The question is whether audiences want their Christmas with a side of gothic dread — and whether Depp’s name still pulls people into theaters the way it used to.

What happens next

The full reviews arrive on Thursday, November 12, when the embargo lifts, and that’s when we’ll find out whether the early warmth holds or whether the doubters were the ones reading the room correctly. Either way, Friday’s opening will be watched closely — not just as a box office number, but as a verdict on a comeback that Hollywood has been circling for years without quite knowing how to stage.

For now, the scoreboard reads: mostly positive, genuinely enthusiastic in places, and split right down the middle on the one question that matters most. Is this a great Christmas movie, or is it a vehicle? The answer, it turns out, depends entirely on who you ask — and, maybe, on how much you missed Johnny Depp in the first place.

Source: Just Jared