A few years back, the X trilogy was a massive win for horror filmmaker Ti West. The writer-director whose roots stretched all the way back to the ‘mumblecore’ shoestring-budget horror films of the ‘00s, alongside folks like Adam Wingard, had taken a break from filmmaking for a period of several years. However, in 2022, he came roaring back to life in surprising form, releasing not one but two interconnected Mia Goth-starring throwback horror films in the form of X and Pearl.
While those A24 films were modestly budgeted, they each earned massive acclaim and performed financially well, resulting in West getting to close out this new trilogy with a bigger budget, more ambitious capper, MaXXXine in 2024.
The films all performed exceedingly well and even earned staunch reviews from the likes of Martin Scorsese, seemingly setting West up for an incredibly promising career in the years ahead. No longer would he have to scrap and scrape for a budget to fund his films; the studios and big brass had well and truly taken note of his three-peat success. So what is the first post-X trilogy project that Ti West is tackling? A Johnny Depp-starring Christmas Carol retread for Paramount, titled Ebenezer.
The first trailer for Ebenezer was released last week, just prior to Depp himself showing up to promote the film at Comic-Con, and as much as it dismays me to say, the marketing for West’s newest film is atrocious in every conceivable way.
To address the elephant in the room immediately, Johnny Depp is not the person I would have picked for West to collaborate with immediately post-success. Whatever your opinions may be on Depp, he clearly has a long and fraught history that has made him an exceedingly controversial figure in recent years. Those very controversies have kept Depp out of mainstream productions for several years now, with Ebenezer serving as his comeback, and the marketing for the film has an overt and desperate desire to lean all the way into this angle.
The trailer literally opens with title cards that read, "He brought us Jack Sparrow… Edward Scissorhands… and The Mad Hatter,” over a trite orchestral track and audio of Depp cackling maniacally. Entire dissertations could be written on the erroneous implications of these title cards alone, but I’ll save you the trouble and simply say that this is clearly leaning into the kinds of support Depp received on social media during his court trials.
Thanks to the campaign spearheaded by PR manager Melissa Nathan (who also dusted off the exact same bag of tricks for a Justin Baldoni court case just a few years later, make of that what you will, etc.), there was a not-entirely-organic (read: manufactured) wave of support that swept across social media platforms, attempting to mine millennial audiences’ nostalgia for Depp’s prior film roles. So opening the trailer in this way (maliciously or not) is clearly attempting to capitalize on that now years-old online momentum.
But from there, things only get worse. The hook of the Ebenezer trailer seems to be two-fold: believing that audiences are desperate to see Johnny Depp’s take on this character and trying to sell it as “The name you know. The story you don’t.” This is asinine for multiple reasons, chief among them being that what is readily apparent about Depp’s performance here is atrociously off-key even in bite-size chunks, and the fact that audiences are not just familiar with the story of Ebenezer Scrooge; it is practically baked into the very fabric of pop culture at this point. Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol has been adapted literally hundreds of times. It has starred Patrick Stewart, Scrooge McDuck, the Muppets, Bill Murray, and even uncanny-valley Jim Carrey. Audiences are very familiar with the story of Ebenezer Scrooge, which makes the idea of basing a key portion of the marketing around this non-existent-mystery angle beyond idiotic.
For what it’s worth, the pretty obvious way to sell this was the opposite of what Paramount and co. are actually doing: lean into the Ti West of it all and shroud Depp’s performance in mystique and obfuscation in the marketing. West has actual goodwill behind his work that audiences have actually organically connected with in the last decade, not just the remnants of some manufactured social media-based PR stunt to try and sway the opinions of a jury. The idea of a Ti West-directed take on A Christmas Carol holds vastly more potential for the imagination, and opting to merely tease Depp would allow people to become organically curious about what the performer might bring to the role after all his troubles and years away. After all, there is a certain level of metatextual interest there; casting modern-day Depp as an unlikable and filled-with-hatred man who learns the error of his ways isn’t nothing.
However, Ebenezer’s actual marketing seems to be keen on keeping Depp front-and-center and neglecting to even mention West’s involvement in any sort of meaningful way. They even opted to trot the actor out in full Scrooge garb at Comic-Con to do some inexplicable and cringe-inducing crowd work. Thus, our marketing campaign is already packed-to-the-gills with glimpses at Depp delivering a hammy and atonal performance, all of which are completely at odds with this story, this character, and even the visual choices on display from West’s craft.
It all adds up to a genuinely stupefying marketing campaign and makes Ebenezer look like it is going to be an awful waste of Ti West’s talents.
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