©Courtesy of Nosferatu
Robert Eggers will be writing and directing a new adaptation of Charles Dickens’s timeless classic, A Christmas Carol. The movie is scheduled to be released by Warner Bros. Pictures on December 25, 2026.
According to an exclusive report in Deadline, Eggers will be producing the project with Chris and Eleanor Columbus of Maiden Voyage. Willem Dafoe will reportedly play the role of the miserly Ebenezer Scrooge in the forthcoming release.
Eggers most recently directed the vampire film Nosferatu with a cast that included Bill Skarsgard, Nicholas Hoult, Lily-Rose Depp, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Emma Corrin and Willem Dafoe. Other features by Eggers have included The Northman, The Lighthouse and The Witch. He told an interviewer earlier this year that he does not like to make films set in contemporary times, declaring that “The idea of having to photograph a car makes me ill.”
Though no details have been released about how Eggers will be approaching the material, it’s being speculated that he will be taking a darker look at Dickens’s original story.
First published in 1843, Dickens’s A Christmas Carol is one of the most beloved and familiar stories connected with the holiday season. The novella describes three ghosts (of Christmas past, present, and future) that visit the miserly Ebenezer Scrooge, as predicted by his late business partner Jacob Marley.Over the years, hundreds of versions of the story were made for movies, television, and new media.
The earliest surviving example is Scrooge; or Marley’s Ghost, a silent film from the UK directed by William R. Booth in 1901. In 1954, Maxwell Anderson wrote an adaptation for American television featuring Basil Rathbone as Marley’s ghost and Fredric March as Scrooge. Recent screen adaptations include a British television version made in 2019, starring Guy Pearce, Andy Serkis, Stephen Graham, Charlotte Riley and Joe Alwyn. In 2009, Jim Carrey starred as Scrooge in a 2009 animated feature directed by Robert Zemeckis.
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