Box Office Pro estimates put the Ti West horror film in a modest range for Depp's first wide theatrical release since 2018, according to Koimoi.
Johnny Depp's first wide theatrical release in eight years is tracking for a solid but unspectacular debut. Box Office Pro's latest projection, cited by Koimoi, puts Ti West's Ebenezer: A Christmas Carol at $25 million to $35 million domestically when it opens on November 13.
That is not nothing. But it is also not the comeback number a Depp-sized name would have commanded a decade ago.
For context, his last wide release was Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald back in 2018, which opened to $62.1 million in the US. Go further back and you get Black Mass in 2015, which debuted at $22.6 million, and Mortdecai the same year, which barely cleared $4.2 million. Neither film landed well with critics, and neither gave Depp much box office momentum heading into the years that followed, years dominated by his very public legal fight with Amber Heard rather than anything on screen.
This is the project that is supposed to change that conversation. Ti West, the director behind the X trilogy and Pearl, takes Depp into horror territory with a retelling of Charles Dickens' ghost story, Scrooge and all, set in early Victorian London. It is the kind of out-of-the-box casting Depp has built a career on, and his fans online have been vocal about wanting him back on a big screen in a leading role.
Where things get tricky is positioning. Koimoi points out that Ebenezer does not slot neatly into the adult holiday-horror lane that Violent Night and Silent Night tried to own. Violent Night opened to $13.4 million in December 2022, Silent Night managed just $3 million the following year. Ebenezer sits somewhere between that darker seasonal fare and the kind of family-friendly Christmas Carol retellings audiences are used to every November, and that in-between zone makes forecasting it genuinely difficult.
A $25-35 million range would still be the best domestic opening of Depp's career post-Grindelwald, by some distance. Whether it actually lands at the top end or the bottom end likely comes down to how the marketing frames it over the next three weeks, horror crowd or Christmas crowd, and whether Depp's name alone is enough to pull people into theatres again after everything that has played out in public since 2020.
Ebenezer: A Christmas Carol opens worldwide on November 13. Tracking numbers will firm up as the release date gets closer, and the real test starts the Friday it hits screens.
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