LOS ANGELES (The Thursday Times) — Ebenezer, director Ti West’s take on Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol with Johnny Depp as Ebenezer Scrooge, led the North American box office on its opening day, taking $6.7 million on Friday in the actor’s first major studio film in eight years.
The total includes $1.5 million from Thursday preview screenings at 3,535 cinemas in the United States and Canada, industry figures showed. Paramount Pictures, which released the film, is looking at an opening weekend of about $20 million, though rival studios expect a little less, plus roughly another $20 million from 63 international markets, including the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Japan, and Mexico.
A $20 million start would put the film close to the openings of Depp’s 2015 crime drama Black Mass, at $22.6 million, and 2009’s Public Enemies, at $25.2 million. Families appear to be buying tickets: the film’s highest-grossing cinema so far is at the Disney Springs complex in Florida.
A return after eight years
Ebenezer is Depp’s first big Hollywood release since Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald in 2018. Warner Bros removed him from the Harry Potter spin-off series in 2020 after he lost a libel case in London against a British tabloid that had called him a “wife beater”. He later won a defamation case in the United States against his former wife, the actress Amber Heard.
Since then he has worked mostly on smaller films, including the French period drama Jeanne du Barry, which opened the 2023 Cannes Film Festival, and he directed the 2024 biopic Modì, about the Italian painter Amedeo Modigliani.
The cast includes Ian McKellen as Jacob Marley, Rupert Grint, Daisy Ridley, Andrea Riseborough, Sam Claflin, and Tramell Tillman. Critics have been divided, with just over half of reviews positive on the Rotten Tomatoes aggregator, while audiences polled on opening night gave it four and a half stars out of five.
A quiet weekend
Overall ticket sales are modest before next weekend’s release of The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping, which some in the industry expect to open with about $100 million. The animated The Cat in the Hat was second on Friday, ahead of the Japanese monster film Godzilla Minus Zero.
Amazon MGM’s heist comedy How to Rob a Bank, starring Nicholas Hoult and Zoë Kravitz, took $2.2 million on Friday and is heading for an opening of about $4 million to $5 million, against a production cost of more than $40 million.
The Indian epic Ramayana, released in North America by Sony, was on course for about $5 million in its second weekend there, and has passed $100 million worldwide, most of it earned in India.
