Paramount’s Ebenezer: A Christmas Carol tested at 80 out of 100 in an early screening, against an industry norm of 72. Johnny Depp personally scored 86, and 90 among women over 35. The film opens November 13.
Paramount ran a rough cut of Ebenezer: A Christmas Carol for a test audience on August 11 in Paramus, New Jersey.
Studio heads Josh Greenstein and Dana Goldberg reportedly left the theater elated, and the numbers behind that reaction have since reached the trades through Puck News.
The film scored 80 out of 100, meaning roughly four-fifths of the audience rated it excellent or very good. The industry norm for a first cut sits at 72.
Johnny Depp scored higher than the movie.
Depp’s individual performance score came in at 86. The standard for a lead character is 67.
Among women over 35, he scored 90.
What Ebenezer actually is
It’s a Charles Dickens adaptation, but not the version audiences have seen twenty times.
Ti West directs, which is a genuine choice. West made X, Pearl, and MaXXXine, and comes out of horror rather than holiday features. Nathaniel Halpern wrote the screenplay, Emma Watts produces, and Paramount distributes.
The marketing frames it as an origin story, with the teaser poster reading “Before he was Scrooge, he was...” So the pitch is how a man becomes the miser rather than a straight retelling of the ghosts arriving.
It has a strong supporting cast:
Ian McKellen as Jacob Marley
Andrea Riseborough as the Ghost of Christmas Past
Tramell Tillman as the Ghost of Christmas Present
Daisy Ridley as the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come
Rupert Grint as Bob Cratchit
Sam Claflin as Fred
Charlie Murphy and Ellie Bamber as the Fezziwigs
Arthur Conti as a young Ebenezer
It arrives in theaters November 13, 2026.
Paramount limited risk with a small budget
The budget is $40 million, which for a star-driven studio release with that cast is modest.
A film costing $40 million does not need to be a phenomenon to work, which lets Paramount take a risk other studios declined without exposing itself much if audiences stay away.
The studio has spent on marketing, though. Depp appeared at San Diego Comic-Con in full Scrooge makeup, alongside a pop-up store built to resemble Scrooge’s office. The teaser leaned on his older roles and closed with Depp addressing the camera directly: “It’s good to be back.”
Depp’s first studio lead in years
Depp was dropped from the Fantastic Beasts franchise in 2020, where he played Gellert Grindelwald. He spent the following years on smaller international projects, including the French-language Jeanne du Barry, which opened the Cannes Film Festival in 2023 to a standing ovation.
Ebenezer is his first lead role in a major Hollywood studio film in roughly eight years.
Depp has consistently rejected the word comeback. “I keep wondering about the word ‘comeback’ because I didn’t go anywhere,” he said at Cannes in 2023. “Maybe people stopped calling. I don’t know what their fear was at the time.”
He was blunter about the years before that. “Of course, when you’re asked to resign from a film you’re doing, because of something that is merely a bunch of kind of vowels and consonants floating in the air, you feel a boycott.”
The legal history behind it
The two court cases reached different conclusions, and both are part of the record.
In 2018, Amber Heard wrote a Washington Post op-ed describing herself as a domestic abuse survivor without naming Depp. Depp sued The Sun in the United Kingdom that year over reporting that called him a wife beater, and in 2020 a UK judge ruled that description was substantially true. Depp lost.
He then sued Heard for defamation in Virginia. In 2022, a jury sided largely with Depp, awarding him damages while granting Heard $2 million on a countersuit. The two later settled for $1 million.
Different courts, different standards of proof, different outcomes. People have drawn opposite conclusions from the same pair of verdicts, and that disagreement has not gone anywhere.
Why other studios are watching
The test scores matter beyond one movie.
Industry reporting suggests studios have begun treating Depp as a bankable draw again, and Ebenezer is being read as the test case for whether audiences will show up.
The most immediate consequence is at Disney. Producer Jerry Bruckheimer confirmed at D23 that talks with Depp are underway for Pirates of the Caribbean 6, saying “we’re talking with Johnny, we’re working on a screenplay, and hopefully we can get this done.”
Depp has made his displeasure with Disney known before. They too dropped the actor after unproven accusations were made.
It is unclear if he would return.
A test screening is a small room in New Jersey, not a box office result. Paramount has a rough cut that played well and four-fifths of one audience saying they liked it. November decides the rest.
Article compiled with the help of the Pirates & Princesses newsroom.
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Hat Tips:
Puck News via World of Reel and Dark Horizons (August 21-22, 2026), Matthew Belloni’s reporting on the August 11 test screening, the 80 and 86 scores, the 90 among women over 35, the Q Score figures, and the studio executives in attendance
Dark Horizons (August 22, 2026), the full cast list, the $40 million budget, the Comic-Con activation, and the November 13 release date
Wikipedia (retrieved August 23, 2026), the production credits, screenwriter, producer, and distributor
Entertainment Tonight (May 2023), Depp’s Cannes press conference remarks on the boycott and the comeback label
Deadline (August 16, 2026), Jerry Bruckheimer’s D23 comments on Pirates of the Caribbean 6