Box Office: ‘Ebenezer’ Opens to Modest $19 Million, Showing Johnny Depp Is Still a Draw for the Right Price

If Johnny Depp was hoping that “Ebenezer” would mark a glorious return to mainstream movies, he may need to hold out for another vehicle. The Christmas fable, released long before Thanksgiving, let alone the holidays, topped the box office this weekend with $19 million domestically and $42 million globally, a solid but unremarkable debut. It shows that enough moviegoers are able to look past the scandals that led Hollywood to remove Depp from their call sheets for the better part of a decade, but also exposed the limitations of his popular appeal. The fact is that Depp was always something of a dicey commercial proposition. Put him in a “Pirates of the Caribbean” movie and you were guaranteed to earn $1 billion even if the script sucked and the plot seemed designed at the end of a wine bottle. Team him with Tim Burton, as he was quite successfully with “Sweeney Todd” ($153 million gross, $50 million budget), “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” ($475.8 million gross, $150 million budget), and “Alice in Wonderland” ($1 billion gross, $200 million budget), and you were likely to have a big hit. Well, unless they were looking to reboot “Dark Shadows.” But the rest of Depp’s track record was spotty. “Public Enemies” ($214.1 million gross, $100 million budget) and “Black Mass” ($100 million gross, $53 million budget) did well considering they were R-rated adult dramas, but struggled to break even because they cost too much to make and Depp commanded his full $20 million salary. Then there were the costly bombs, a litany of duds that includes “Mortdecai” ($47.3 million gross, $60 million budget), “The Lone Ranger” ($260.5 million gross, $250 million budget), “Transcendence” ($103 million gross, $150 million budget), and “Alice Through the Looking Glass” ($300 million gross, $170 million budget), the latter a return to Wonderland sans Burton. Many of these seemed like paycheck gigs rather than an attempt to burnish Depp’s star power. There was private island to pay for and a pirate-themed wine cave to keep stocked on Depp’s sprawling French estate. But the promise of another Jack Sparrow adventure meant that Hollywood was able to look the other way, confident that there was more plunder to be found by allowing the actor to follow his idiosyncratic muse. Depp could have kept going like this, but his messy personal life interceded. Depp’s reputation took a hit in 2020 when he became embroiled in a costly, two-continent legal battle against ex-wife Amber Heard, in which he was accused of domestic abuse. He denied the allegations, and later lost a U.K. libel suit against The Sun, when the court found an article calling Depp a “wife beater” was “substantially true.” Depp would go on to defamation trial against Heard in the U.S., after she wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post, calling herself a domestic abuse survivor. By that time, he’d been fired from the “Fantastic Beasts” franchise (it would be canceled after a non-Depp-led installment bombed), and was consigned to appearing in straight-to-streaming schlock or barely seen indies. But it wasn’t just the reputational damage that made major studios skittish about Depp. They had grown tired of his antics. There were reports he would show up late and unprepared, even as his salary demands and requests for perks escalated. That’s fine when your movies are making lots of money, it’s less charming when they are losing it. So a lot is riding on “Ebenezer.” Depp looked a little uneasy on red carpets promoting the movie and Paramount, which is backing the film, wisely kept him from doing profiles with harder-hitting journalists who might ask him a probing question. He also cut his salary, reportedly receiving a $5 million paycheck to play one of his dream roles — Ebenezer Scrooge, and with it a chance to wear fright makeup and talk in a weird voice. But unlike most of Depp’s recent films, “Ebenezer” is poised to be a modest financial success. The film skewed older, with 59% of its domestic audience over the age of 30, and was slightly more female, as only 48% of ticket buyers were men. Paramount said it over-indexed in the South. One warning sign is that family crowds didn’t turn out in force for the PG-13 movie, comprising just 9% of opening weekend crowds. However, the $38 million budget is low enough that if the film continues to draw crowds through the holidays and performs well overseas, where it has earned $23 million, it will turn a profit. But that points to a new reality — Depp is a sound bet, for the right price. Maybe that was a lesson that studios should have taken long ago. Depp’s taste is rococo, but Hollywood kept treating every one of his outings like potential blockbusters when a little more caution was warranted. Next up for Depp is “Day Drinker,” an action thriller that seems to play into the star’s libertine image. Lionsgate will release the film in March. Will it be the vehicle that puts the 63-year-old Depp back on top, or will it, like “Ebenezer,” confirm that there’s still a smaller, but committed audience for his antics? Budget accordingly.