Hollywood banks on Ebenezer to bring Johnny Depp in from the cold

Dickens character is actor’s first big studio role after years overshadowed by legal battles with ex-wife Amber Heard

“It’s good to be back,” Johnny Depp declares in the trailer for Ebenezer, in which he stars as Charles Dickens’s miserly Scrooge – his first big Hollywood studio production in eight years.

The message is clear: this is Depp’s comeback, after years in which his career was overshadowed by legal battles with his former wife Amber Heard.

Paramount has made a point of invoking Depp’s most famous roles – the trailer opens with references to Captain Jack Sparrow, Edward Scissorhands and the Mad Hatter, before announcing: “The master of misfits returns.”

When the film opens on 13 November, it will be a test – not just of whether Depp can still sell cinema tickets, but whether Hollywood can restore him to the ranks of mainstream leading men.

“I think Ebenezer will serve as a bellwether for the industry as to Depp’s bankability,” said Robert Mitchell, the director of theatrical insights at Gower Street Analytics.

“Depp has proven he’s most bankable in the past when aligned to a specific type of film, essentially those with larger-than-life, almost grotesque characters of the type he began playing for Tim Burton in the 1990s.

“That is what the marketing is leaning into with Ebenezer – Depp in a specific, recognisable mode rather than just Depp the actor.”

In 2020, Depp lost a libel case against the Sun’s publisher, with a judge ruling that the paper’s description of him as a “wife beater” was substantially true.

Two years later, in a separate US defamation trial, a jury found that Heard had defamed Depp in a Washington Post article and awarded him $10.35m (£7.7m) in damages. It also found that one of Depp’s lawyers had defamed Heard, awarding her $2m. The pair settled their appeals in 2022.

Depp was asked to step down from his role as Gellert Grindelwald in the Fantastic Beasts franchise after losing the UK case, with Mads Mikkelsen replacing him in the third film.

His subsequent films included Minamata, which made less than $1m at the global box office, and Jeanne du Barry, whose 2023 Cannes premiere was accompanied by protests over the festival’s decision to platform Depp.

But now Hollywood appears increasingly willing to work with the actor again. His next film, Day Drinker, is due for release in 2027, while the producer Jerry Bruckheimer has said he is in discussions with Depp about a possible sixth Pirates of the Caribbean film.

In Ebenezer, Depp returns to the eccentric, heavily stylised performances for which he became famous. Its director, Ti West, told Entertainment Weekly that Depp brought a particular musicality to Dickens’s dialogue, adding: “He’s the movie, really.”

Depp, 63, has also been central to the film’s marketing campaign. He appeared at San Diego Comic-Con in July, dressed as Scrooge. This week, he appeared in character at New York’s Bryant Park, where he disrupted carol singers and knocked over a Christmas tree.

“Hollywood stars are worth every penny they’re paid when they’re cast in the right role, and they’re worth very little in the wrong role,” said David A Gross, who writes the FranchiseRe newsletter. “We just saw Tom Cruise crash in Digger. It’s a good example – there’s no bigger star than him.”

But he added that Scrooge was a promising fit for Depp: an eccentric, funny and familiar character that played to his strengths.

An August report by the website Puck, based on a test screening in New Jersey, offered an encouraging early indication for Paramount.

The film scored 80 out of 100, compared with a reported historical average of 72, while Depp received a score of 86. Women aged over 35 were particularly positive. However, test-screening figures are no guarantee of box office success.

Paul Dergarabedian, the head of marketplace trends at Rentrak, said enough time had passed since the trial for it not to be uppermost in audiences’ minds. “The reviews and the marketing will matter more than how people feel about Johnny Depp personally,” he said.

While some viewers might avoid the film because of their feelings about Depp, Dergarabedian added, it was difficult to establish a direct link between controversy about a star and a film’s box office performance.

Tanya Horeck, a professor of film and feminist media studies at Anglia Ruskin University, emphasised that Depp had never disappeared from public view, remaining the face of Dior’s Sauvage fragrance while his supporters continued to defend him online.

“The idea that this is Depp’s big ‘comeback’ suggests that he went away somehow,” she said. “In fact, the defamation trial largely elevated his star persona as some kind of misunderstood renegade figure.”

Of Hollywood’s willingness to cast him again, Horeck said: “The heralding of Depp’s ‘return’ is indicative of how male stars accused of misconduct are being rehabilitated for public consumption.”

Heard, meanwhile, has largely withdrawn from Hollywood. She recently appeared in Silenced, a documentary about the use of defamation law against survivors of gender-based violence, which premiered at the Sundance festival this year.