Cinema

Johnny Depp Is No. 1 Again. Hollywood’s Forgiveness Was Always for Sale

Johnny Depp's Ebenezer topped the US box office this weekend. Like Mel Gibson and Gary Oldman before him, he has learned that Hollywood forgives stars who make money.

Husam Sam Asi 15 November 2026, 21:10

Johnny Depp at the New York special screening of Ebenezer. Photo supplied by Paramount Pictures.

Ebenezer Scrooge needed three ghosts and a single night to buy back the world’s affection. Johnny Depp needed nearly a decade, a courtroom in Virginia, millions of dollars in legal bills and an army of fans on TikTok. This weekend his Scrooge in Ti West’s Ebenezer opened at No. 1 in North America with an estimated $19 million, and about $42 million worldwide. It is his first film to top the chart since Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald in 2018, the franchise Warner Bros. asked him to leave two years later.

Critics shrugged. Audiences cheered, handing the film an A- CinemaScore. And at Paramount, the people who matter most in this story, the accountants, were smiling too.

The price of a pariah

Paramount paid Depp $5 million, plus bonuses tied to ticket sales. In 2013 he was a $20-million-a-movie star whose run of flops already had studio bosses wondering whether he was worth the money. Then, in 2016, Amber Heard accused him of domestic abuse. His agent, Jack Whigham, later testified that her 2018 newspaper article about abuse was “catastrophic” and killed a $22.5 million verbal deal for a sixth Pirates of the Caribbean. In November 2020 Depp lost his libel case in London against the Sun, which had called him a “wife beater”. Warner Bros. asked him to resign as Grindelwald, and Mads Mikkelsen took the part.

Hollywood was never shocked by what Depp was accused of. When I met him in 2011, at the peak of his fame as Hollywood’s highest-paid actor, he told me that “money is the universal language of the world”. It is certainly Hollywood’s mother tongue. The industry punishes stars for one sin only: becoming a liability. A star who threatens the profit margin is shown the door, and a star who restores it is welcomed back with a hug.

Lawyers, hashtags and a Virginia jury

Fallen stars have two roads back. Russell Brand took the spiritual one: facing his own accusers, he was baptised in the River Thames in 2024. This month a London judge sentenced him to ten and a half years for rape and sexual assault. The smart ones take the other road and spend their fortunes on lawyers, publicists and crisis managers.

Depp spent his. His former lawyer Adam Waldman took the fight to the tabloids until, in October 2020, a Virginia judge removed him from the case for leaking protected information. Then Depp took Heard to trial over that newspaper article in Fairfax, Virginia, in front of the cameras. In June 2022 the jury awarded him $10 million in compensatory damages and $5 million in punitive damages, which the judge cut to $350,000 under state law. Heard won $2 million on one of her counterclaims. A trial lawyer estimated that the Virginia case alone cost Depp about $5.5 million. The two settled that December; Depp’s lawyers said Heard’s insurer would pay him $1 million.

The livestream was his masterstroke. Fans turned #JusticeForJohnnyDepp into a social media storm, and the public verdict came in long before the jury’s. Heard’s lawyer, Elaine Bredehoft, called the online chatter “lopsided” and said of the jurors: “There’s no way they couldn’t have been influenced by it.” Within a year Depp was opening the Cannes Film Festival with Jeanne du Barry and signing a Dior Sauvage contract reported at more than $20 million, the biggest men’s fragrance deal ever.

Mel Gibson drew the map

Depp followed a well-worn path. In 2006 Mel Gibson told a Malibu police officer that the Jews were responsible for all the wars in the world. Disney still released his Apocalypto that December. The doors slammed only in 2010, when recordings of him abusing and threatening his ex-girlfriend Oksana Grigorieva went online. His agency, WME, dropped him, and the cast of The Hangover Part II got his cameo cut.

When I interviewed him in 2011, he shrugged off his critics and told me “the answer is always a spiritual solution.” Hollywood’s answer was money. When I interviewed him again in 2016, he told me he had stopped financing his own films because he feared losing money at the box office. Then Hacksaw Ridge, made for $40 million, earned $180.6 million worldwide. The outcast collected three Golden Globe nominations and six Oscar nominations, including Best Director for himself, and the film won two Oscars. In January 2025, Donald Trump made him a special ambassador to Hollywood.

Gibson had already rescued another pariah. By 2001, after a string of drug arrests and almost a year in prison, Robert Downey Jr. was considered too great an insurance risk to employ. Gibson paid his insurance bond for The Singing Detective. “He kept a roof over my head and put food on my table,” Downey said in 2011, as he urged Hollywood to forgive his friend. Downey went on to become Iron Man and won an Oscar for Oppenheimer.

Gary Oldman tested the rules in 2014, when he defended Gibson in Playboy by saying he was “in a town that’s run by Jews”. He apologised to the Anti-Defamation League and on Jimmy Kimmel Live!. Oldman remained an asset, so four years later Hollywood gave him the Oscar, the Golden Globe, the BAFTA and the SAG award for playing Winston Churchill in Darkest Hour.

A baby step back

Depp’s $5 million is a baby step. Disney is reportedly watching Ebenezer before it decides whether to bring Jack Sparrow back. If the film holds over Christmas, the studios will rediscover their love for him and the fees will climb again. Scrooge was redeemed by ghosts. Depp will be redeemed by accountants.