A raven swoops over snowy London. A baby in a bonnet starts to cry. “The master of misfits returns,” spiky red letters proclaim. Johnny Depp is back. Ebenezer is Paramount’s new film, out in November, a dark retelling of Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, made by Ti West, director of campy horrors like MaXXXine (2024). In the recently released trailer, Depp winks, leers, cackles and makes fart noises. “It’s good to be back,” he growls.
Depp hasn’t been gone very long. He was dropped from the Fantastic Beasts Harry Potter spin-off series in 2020 after he lost a UK libel trial he had brought against the Sun, which had called him a “wife-beater”. The UK High Court found that he had physically abused his ex-wife Amber Heard on at least 12 occasions, including slapping her, pulling her hair and knocking her to the floor. A few years later, he successfully sued Heard in the US for a 2018 article she had written in the Washington Post, in a televised jury trial.