Johnny Depp's Scrooge movie topped charts worldwide even as reviewers and audiences handed it wildly different verdicts, with trade outlets framing the gap as a referendum on his comeback.
Johnny Depp's Ebenezer took the top box office spot both at home and abroad this weekend, and the numbers tell two completely different stories depending on who you ask.
Domestically, the film pulled in $19 million, adding another $23 million overseas, according to figures from Variety and Deadline cited by TMZ. Against a $38 million budget, that's a solid start by any studio's math, not a blockbuster number but enough to call it a win.
Here's where it gets messy. Critics are nowhere near as kind as the box office chart suggests. Ebenezer sits at a 54% on the Tomatometer, roughly a coin flip. Audiences, though, are a different animal entirely. The film is verified hot on Rotten Tomatoes with an 89% Popcornmeter score and an A- CinemaScore, the kind of gap that usually means one group is watching a different movie than the other.
The Wall Street Journal ran both sides of that divide in the same publication. One feature treated the film as a near-perfect PR vehicle for Depp's rehabilitation. A separate review from the same outlet wasn't buying the performance itself, calling Depp "ridiculously blustery and loud" as Scrooge, like a man working overtime for laughs that aren't landing.
Vanity Fair went further, framing the whole release as an exercise in image management, describing it as Depp using the holiday setting to launder his reputation in front of a paying audience.
That's the tension sitting under every headline this weekend. Is this a genuine comeback built on a film people actually enjoy watching, or a studio betting a classic Dickens story and the month of December can soften a few years of bad press? Both readings can be true at once, and going by the CinemaScore, the people who bought tickets didn't seem to care which one it was.
For Depp, an A- CinemaScore and a 89% audience score are the kind of numbers that studios chase regardless of what critics think, because they're the figures that drive word of mouth into a second and third weekend. Whether that holds through the rest of the holiday window, against a release calendar that only gets more crowded as Christmas approaches, is the next thing worth watching.
The more interesting number might not even be this weekend's. It's whether Ebenezer can keep legs through December without critics coming around, or whether the audience-critic gap just quietly becomes the story everyone remembers about it.
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