Ebenezer: A Christmas Carol has added a couple more big names to its cast, with Ian McKellen and Tramell Tillman joining Johnny Depp in Ti West’s film. Update: The starry cast of director Ti West’s Ebenezer: A Christmas Carol is steadily growing, with two more major names joining Johnny Depp and Andrea Riseborough. Sir Ian ... Ebenezer: A Christmas Carol | Ian McKellen joins cast of Ti West’s Scrooge movie
Ebenezer: A Christmas Carol has added a couple more big names to its cast, with Ian McKellen and Tramell Tillman joining Johnny Depp in Ti West’s film.
Update: The starry cast of director Ti West’s Ebenezer: A Christmas Carol is steadily growing, with two more major names joining Johnny Depp and Andrea Riseborough. Sir Ian McKellen is now in the mix according to Deadline, with the legendary thespian accompanied by Trammell Tillman, who was electric in TV’s Severance and previously appeared on the large screen in the most recent Mission: Impossible flick.
Is this a step towards the mainstream for director Ti West, a filmmaker previously known for his horror films, or is he about to play up the ghastlier elements already present in Dickens’ original text? His Ebenezer is due out this time next year, so there isn’t too long to wait.
Our original story follows…
24th October: We haven’t even reached the festive season, but already we’ve got news on Christmas films coming in 2026.
Deadline reports that Johnny Depp will star in Ebenezer: A Christmas Carol, another adaptation of Charles Dickens’ timeless holiday story. Andrea Riseborough will also star against Depp and Paramount is in final discussions to house the project.
And the director? Well, here’s the slightly surprising bit. Ti West, of X, Pearl and MaXXXine fame, has reportedly signed on to direct.
It’s a big step away from the horror genre where West has mostly made his name in. That being said, perhaps this adaptation is leaning on the horror elements of the classic ghost story more than many of the other adaptations.
Depp will play Ebenezer Scrooge, a miserable miser who is visited by the ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Future and is forced to come to terms with his life. Depp hasn’t starred in a major studio movie since 2018’s Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes Of Grindelwald due to some highly publicised and problematic legal issues we won’t recount here. Whether those troubles have considerably hurt his blockbuster box office draw remains to be seen, but this writer might skip watching Ebenezer: A Christmas Carol.
Ebenezer: A Christmas Carol is due to hit cinemas on 13th November 2026 and is the second adaptation of A Christmas Carol announced this year. In June, word reached our news desk that Robert Eggers was also cooking up a new adaptation of the novel with Willem Dafoe as Ebenezer Scrooge at Warner Bros. Considering Eggers has just started production on Werwulf, we probably won’t see his Christmas movie for some time yet.
More on Ebenezer: A Christmas Carol as we hear it.
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