Paramount puts Johnny Depp's Ebenezer Scrooge on Venmo, answering fans' money requests with a single penny

Key Takeaways

• Paramount Pictures has given Ebenezer Scrooge his own Venmo profile to promote Ebenezer, Ti West's new film starring Johnny Depp as the Dickens miser.

• The film's official X account, @ebenezermovie, announced the stunt on 22 October 2026, inviting fans to send Scrooge a money request and see whether he is feeling generous.

• The launch video shows a $500 request for student loans answered with a payment of $0.01 and the message "Generosity has its limits."

• Ebenezer opens in cinemas in the US on 13 November 2026, and fans can send requests or payments to the character's public Venmo profile.

Paramount Pictures has put Johnny Depp's Ebenezer Scrooge on Venmo to promote Ebenezer, Ti West's new adaptation of A Christmas Carol, by setting up a profile for the famously tight-fisted miser and inviting the public to ask him for cash. The film's official Instagram account announced the account on 22 October with the line "Ebenezer Scrooge is now on @venmo. Think he's feeling generous? Send a request," and anyone who has read Dickens will have guessed the answer long before the payment notification arrives.

Every request becomes a tiny scene from the film, with a member of the public playing the hopeful supplicant and Scrooge, or whoever is running his account, playing the miser who sends back a single cent, sometimes with a dismissive note attached.

It also arrives at a useful moment in the release calendar, about three weeks before the film reaches cinemas, when Paramount needs people talking about a period drama in the language of their own phones, and a penny landing in a Venmo feed is a far easier thing to share than a trailer link. The announcement post tagged Venmo's own account and included a link for sending a request, which means taking part needs nothing more than the app and a few seconds, so every penny Scrooge sends back lands in a stranger's transaction history.

The more surprising twist is that money has been travelling in the other direction too, because the account's public feed shows people sending payments to Scrooge, many of them with memos written in the spirit of the story. One payer sent money "For cheers and joy! (And maybe a little luck please)," while another labelled a payment as a "Retainer Fee" for the Ghost of Christmas Past to haunt their exes with a little bah humbug spirit, and several others simply sent cash to boost their own Christmas cheer. It remains unclear who receives those payments, how much has been sent or whether the account transfers money in every case, and Paramount has not said publicly what happens to the funds, so fans are effectively paying a fictional miser for the pleasure of joining in, and the safest assumption for anyone tempted to send Scrooge a festive tip is that, true to form, he is unlikely to give it back.

Paramount's Ebenezer marketing follows Johnny Depp's Comic-Con appearance as Scrooge before the film opens on 13 November

The Venmo account is the latest step in a campaign that has been putting Depp's Scrooge in front of fans since the summer, and in July he made a surprise appearance at San Diego Comic-Con as Scrooge on Thursday 23 July, turning up outside a shop called Scrooge and Marley in the city's Gaslamp district at around 2.30pm. Fans had begun gathering just after noon, some of them dressed as Depp's earlier characters such as Captain Jack Sparrow and the Mad Hatter, and he greeted the crowd in character by asking, "Have you no jobs? It seems as though you have so much spare time," which set the tone for the playful, grumpy persona the Venmo profile now carries online.

Ebenezer is directed by Ti West, best known for the horror trilogy that began with X, from a screenplay by Nathaniel Halpern based on Dickens' novel, and it is produced by Emma Watts. Depp leads a cast that includes Rupert Grint as Bob Cratchit, Andrea Riseborough as the Ghost of Christmas Past, Tramell Tillman as the Ghost of Christmas Present and Ian McKellen as Jacob Marley, alongside Sam Claflin, Daisy Ridley, Arthur Conti, Ellie Bamber, Henry Lloyd-Hughes and Charlie Murphy, while the logline "The name you know, the story you don't" and a trailer that leans on ghosts and Scrooge being buried alive point to a darker take on the familiar tale.

Paramount first announced the project in October 2025 with West directing and Depp cast as Scrooge, and further cast members joined over the following two months before filming began in Dublin and London in January 2026. Paramount then showed footage at CinemaCon in April, ahead of the Comic-Con appearance in July, and the trailer's frightening ghosts suggest a version of Dickens' story that leans into the ghost story as much as the Christmas redemption.

The stunt follows a similar approach to Apple TV sending a Widow's Bay billboard around Cape Cod, where the marketing stayed inside the world of the show and let a fictional character's agenda play out in real life. In both cases the promotion asks audiences to treat a character as if they were really out there, and Scrooge sending pennies to strangers is a neat way of giving people a small, personal taste of the miser before they meet him on the big screen on 13 November.