Why are they marketing the Johnny Depp (gross) Christmas Carol like this?

Johnny Depp (gross) is in a new adaptation of A Christmas Carol. This is gross, but whatever. We've long since learned that there's no such think as cancellation, we have only to be disappointed in that fact over and over again.

But something else is going on here.

Something really strange.

Obviously I have not read the screenplay for this film, I have no information outside of what's online, but what's online makes it seem like a pretty standard adaptation of the novel.

It's directed by Ti West, who's mostly known for his horror trilogy, X, Pearl, and MaXXXine, so presumably they're going for a spookier version than the Muppets, but from the cast list alone it seems to follow the pattern we all know.

Jacob Marley is there, played by Ian McKellan (disappointing). There are the ghosts past, present and future. Rupert Grint is Bob Cratchitt, Sam Claflin is nephew Fred.

The full cast list isn't up anywhere, but based on what's there it all seems normal.

But they've just released the first poster and the first trailer and they're both kind of odd.

While the title was originally down as Ebenezer: A Christmas Carol, the poster just says Ebenezer. And the tagline is Before he was Scrooge he was...

The trailer goes heavy on the fact that it's Johnny Depp, and his Scrooge leans hard into scampery, spitefully hurling snowballs at people and saying humbug three more times than strictly necessary. And it includes its own tagline: The name you know...the story you don't.

This is obviously hilarious just as it stands. The origin story of Ebenezer Scrooge makes up at least the first third of A Christmas Carol. It's the whole point of the book – this is how he became so awful, and this is what will happen because of it. The idea of some film executive pitching "what if we do an origin story of a character whose origin is already in the story" is both absurd and somehow, in this particular media landscape, predictable.

But while we can't be sure until the film is out and someone puts the synopsis on Wikipedia because we're sure as hell not going to see it, it really doesn't look like that's what this film is.

The trailer shows the character we know in the setting we know with the ghosts we know and the flashbacks we know.

So why the hell are they marketing it like it's a prequel?

It's making me feel insane.

Marketing is all about telling people you're going to give them what they think they want. The think there is particularly important for art and entertainment because most people don't actually know what they want, because what they want is to be surprised.

There are a lot of examples of baffling film marketing campaigns – or if not baffling, at least at quite a distance from the film itself. Last year, for example, Steven Soderbergh's Presence marketed as a horror, but the film itself is a family drama. It's just set in a haunted house. From the point of view of the ghost.

That ones understandable – how do you market a film about a ghost without making it feel like a horror film? I genuinely do not know, but I do know that the film you get is not the one you think you're getting.

Or there's been a lot of discussion around Jennifer's Body bombing in the cinema because the marketing suggested a sexy movie about Megan Fox being hot, but the film itself was a dark fairy tale about feminine rage.

An example I personally find extremely interesting and very shitty is Star Wars: The Force Awakens. A lot of the marketing revolved around shots of John Boyega with a lightsaber.

This promised two things: a black jedi and, combined with the shots of him in a storm troopers uniform, a jedi who used to be a storm trooper. Compelling!

But while John Boyega's Finn does wield a lightsaber for a bit in the film, it's Daisy Ridley's Rey who becomes a jedi. Finn becomes Rey's friend in the first film of the trilogy, a bought in member of the resistance in the second, and all but inessential in the third.

To me, this marketing decision suggests that the fine folks at Lucasfilm thought audiences were more likely to turn up if the jedi was a black man, than they were if the jedi was a woman. This, in my opinion, sucks for everyone!

There's no way to know if they were right, of course, but I suspect they were. I think the worst Star Wars fans see it more as a film for boys than a film for white people – just a little. Just a smidge more sexist than they are racist. And it's infuriating to imaging a marketing team trying to pander to them in whatever way they could.

The point is, marketing is more about selling a possibility of the film than it is about selling the film itself.

So if you've made a new adaptation of a classic, well known, well loved children's story and your marketing tactic is to pretend it's a prequel to a classic, well known, well loved children's story, what does that say about what you think your audience wants to see?

Are we really so deep into a sea of rebootquels and prequels and spinoffs that they're assuming no one wants a straightforward remake anymore? And are they right?

This is a book that's been adapted countless times, and those adaptations are rewatched over and over again. Loads of us watch some version or other of it every Christmas, it's arguably a story that every generation gets their own version of.

There have been two animated Christmas Carols in fairly recent years, Robert Zemeckis motion capture adaptation with Jim Carey came out in 2009, and Netflix had an animated version of the musical Scrooge in 2022, but Ebenezer will be the first live action cinema release since the Muppets. (There's a made for TV musical staring Kelsey Grammar from 2004 and a what if it was gritty mini-series with Guy Pearce from 2019, neither of which I'd heard of before today.)

Aside from it being Johnny Depp (gross) this feels like something people would want. Not me, I'm Caine till death, but other people. But clearly there's an assumption that you can't remake it unless you're doing something new. Obviously no one in Hollywood ever actually wants to do something new, so they do what passes for it: prequels and spin-offs.

We've already had Spirited with Will Ferrel, which tells the story from the perspective of the ghosts, and Disney have apparently green lit Marley which tells it from Jacob Marley's. You have to go back to 1970s Scrooge if you want a live action film with an all-human cast (why would you, but to each his own) and further back if you don't want a musical.

I feel like "we're just doing it normal this time" would be filling a legitimate gap in the market and by the looks of things that is what they're doing.

But it's not what they're selling and that's making me feel genuinely a little bit insane. I think I'm going to feel insane about it until the movie comes out and I can read the wikipedia synopsis and find out if I'm right or if it really is just an origin story.

And if I am right I will continue to feel insane. And I guess that's just how I will live.