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Walmart launches A Who Knew Carol with Walton Goggins as Scrooge, the Muppets and a Ghost of Christmas Fast
Key Takeaways
Walmart has teamed up with Disney and The Muppets Studio on A Who Knew Carol, a holiday campaign inspired by the 1992 film The Muppet Christmas Carol.
Walton Goggins plays Ebenezer Scrooge alongside Kermit the Frog, Miss Piggy, The Great Gonzo, Rizzo the Rat and Pepé the King Prawn, with Stephanie Beatriz as Scrooge's niece.
Three new ghosts, the Ghost of Christmas Presents, the Ghost of Deals to Come and the Ghost of Christmas Fast, each showcase a different part of Walmart's holiday offer.
The campaign launched on 26 October 2026 and runs in English and Spanish through Walmart's Early Black Friday, Black Friday and Cyber Monday events, which take place between 12 November and 2 December.
Walmart has launched A Who Knew Carol, a holiday campaign that borrows one of the most beloved Christmas films of the last few decades and recasts it as a tour of the retailer's gifts, deals and delivery options. Made with Disney and The Muppets Studio, the campaign reimagines The Muppet Christmas Carol with Walton Goggins stepping into the role of Ebenezer Scrooge, a part famously played by Michael Caine in the 1992 original, while a familiar ensemble of Muppets fills the streets of a Victorian town that has suddenly acquired an Express Delivery service.
The premise is a tidy fit for the brand, because the whole point of Walmart's Who Knew? platform is to show sceptical shoppers that the retailer has more to offer than they might expect, and there are few sceptics in literature quite as committed as Scrooge. Instead of the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Yet to Come, the miser is visited by three newly invented spirits whose names give the game away with some relish, so the story of a grump learning to love Christmas becomes a story of a grump learning to love a well stocked shop.
Walmart's A Who Knew Carol casts Walton Goggins as Scrooge with Muppets, Stephanie Beatriz and three new ghosts
The campaign opens with a long form film that reimagines "Scrooge", the opening song of the 1992 film, with Gonzo once again playing Charles Dickens and Rizzo the Rat at his side as narrators while Kermit and Miss Piggy join the musical number. Statler and Waldorf return as the ghostly Marleys, the same parts they played more than three decades ago, and they close the first film by teasing further instalments featuring new ghosts introduced, in their words, "for legal reasons". Pepé the King Prawn also joins the cast despite never appearing in the original film, while Stephanie Beatriz plays Scrooge's niece, a reworking of his nephew Fred, and fronts both the English and the Spanish language spots.
Across the season a series of videos and social posts follows Scrooge as he is visited by each of the new spirits, and each spirit stands for a different part of Walmart's holiday offer, which turns the familiar three act structure of the story into a neat way of covering gifts, savings and convenience in turn. The Ghost of Christmas Presents guides him through quality brands and gifts including De'Longhi espresso makers, trending Disney toys, tech and fashion, while the Ghost of Deals to Come offers a glimpse of the savings arriving with Walmart's Black Friday and Cyber Monday events. The Ghost of Christmas Fast then deals with the last minute panic that afflicts every December, introducing Scrooge to Walmart Express Delivery, which can arrive in as little as 30 minutes for shoppers who left everything rather too late.
Those deal periods give the campaign a clear calendar to follow, since Early Black Friday runs from 12 to 15 November, Black Friday from 23 to 29 November and Cyber Monday from 30 November to 2 December. William White, chief marketing officer at Walmart, has described the campaign as "playful, memorable and full of unexpected surprises all season long", which suits a story that is being told in instalments as each of those deal events arrives.
The work was created by Dept W and Pub W, the Publicis Groupe agency models built for Walmart that bring together Fallon, Leo New York, The Community, Digitas and Zenith, while Radical Media handled production. Randall Einhorn directed the television and online films while SARBY directed the social content, and Union and Plural edited the work before post production at Harbor.
Walmart's Who Knew? platform moves from Goggins as the Grinch in WhoKnewVille to a Muppets Scrooge
A Who Knew Carol is the latest outing for Goggins under the Who Knew? banner, which Walmart introduced in June 2025 as an invitation for people to take a second look at a retailer many assumed they already understood. Analysts have described the platform as an attempt to change how people see the brand and win over higher income shoppers, and White has explained the choice of Dickens in similar terms, saying "We love 'A Christmas Carol' as a story because it's a reappraisal story." That logic explains why Scrooge suits the brief so well, since his entire arc is about a man changing his mind, which is exactly the journey Walmart wants its more doubtful customers to take.
Goggins and Beatriz have been part of that story from the very beginning, as both appeared in the original Who Knew? launch in June 2025, when Beatriz starred in the Spanish language ads and White said that "The role of this campaign is to really change perceptions that people have of the Walmart they think they know." The platform then moved into the holiday season on 27 October 2025, when Publicis Groupe agencies including Fallon, Leo New York and The Community developed WhoKnewVille, a Dr. Seuss inspired holiday world created with Dr. Seuss Enterprises to show off the breadth of Walmart's range and services such as Walmart+. White called that campaign "the ultimate expression of this strategy" in a LinkedIn post, and the same reappraisal logic sits just as comfortably beneath this year's Scrooge.
Last Christmas the retailer took a similar approach with another classic grump, as Goggins played the Grinch in WhoKnewVille, where the Walmart app helped turn the chaos of Black Friday shopping right side up. Announcing the Black Friday chapter of that campaign in November 2025, Goggins said "I'm excited to bring together Walmart's Black Friday Deals and Dr. Seuss' The Grinch for the holidays," before asking "Is there a better combination? I don't think so." Swapping one famous festive cynic for another keeps the formula recognisable from year to year, while the move to the Muppets brings a warmer, more musical tone and a cast of characters that families already know by heart.
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