Johnny Depp's Stupid New Movie is a Political Message

You know, there was an actual time in my childhood when I considered Johnny Depp to be my favorite actor. Looking back at the man’s filmography, I think it must have been entirely because of Edward Scissorhands because he wasn’t in anything else that I would have seen in my early teens. I never saw 21 Jump Street and I sure as hell wasn’t watching Oliver Stone’s Platoon after finishing my homework.

 As I got older I still thought he was pretty good. I even remember loving Sleepy Hollow for some reason, even though, rewatching it as an adult, I think it’s one of the worst movies Tim Burton has ever directed and certainly his worst up until that point. But Johnny Depp was quirky and funny!

 Then he beat up his wife a whole bunch and suffered the dreaded Hollywood Blacklisting, which cost him exactly two (2) film roles.

 But, good fuckin’ news I guess, because Johnny Depp is back! You’ll never guess what character this wacky “master of misfits” is tackling this time! Why, it’s none other than Charles Dickens’ classic Victorian misanthrope, Ebenezer Scrooge! Haha, humbug!!

So this is one of the most embarrassing things I’ve ever seen, and if Johnny Depp hadn’t turned out to be, you know, the kind of person that he is, then I’d feel sorry for him. This trailer is clearly supposed to rekindle your Johnny Depp nostalgia (Deppstalgia? No wait, that sounds like a disease. Which it might be!) but kind of backfires by reminding audiences that this man hasn’t actually had that many memorable roles. At least, not memorable in a positive way.

 Recently, Warner Bros. released a teaser trailer for the upcoming Alejandro Iñárritu flick Digger, starring Tom Cruise, which has a similar nostalgia vibe to it. Tom Cruise is not a “cancelled” actor really, though many have made the case that he should be due to all that creepy Scientology stuff. A lot of people probably forget that Tom Cruise is actually a really good actor who probably would have won an Oscar had he not been fully pigeonholed as an action/stunt star around the early to mid 2000s—likely because of that same creepy Scientology stuff.

 The Digger retrospective trailer reminds you that, despite being known primarily as Ethan Hunt or Space Ethan Hunt for the last two decades, Cruise has actually led a phenomenal and diverse career, and the point of this trailer appears to be to herald his return to character acting.

If you’re fairly familiar with Hollywood movies then you probably know most of those clips. So let’s look back at Johnny Depp’s career and see how much of it has stood the test of time.

 You of course know Edward Scissorhands. You likely know Benny & Joon, What’s Eating Gilbert Grape, Ed Wood, Don Juan DeMarco. And remember Nick of Time? 

No? You might remember it as an interesting concept, but do you remember Depp being in it? Do you remember him in Donnie Brasco or do you remember him being overshadowed by Pacino?

 Here’s a big one: Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. An absolute classic. Do you remember The Ninth Gate? You probably know it as a Polanski film, but do you remember Depp being in that? Do you remember The Astronaut’s Wife? Chocolat? The Man Who Cried?

 Okay, you definitely know Pirates of the Caribbean. Do you remember him in Secret Window? That was a Stephen King movie. Did you ever see The Libertine? Do you know Finding Neverland? He got an Oscar nomination for that. He does an okay Scottish accent. Dustin Hoffman is better in it. (No, I’m not talking about Leaving Neverland, that’s about a very different man with very different issues.)

 I’m belaboring the point. Johnny Depp is misremembered as some kind of Hollywood legend when, in reality, he’s really only known for a handful of over-the-top gimmick performances, and even then, he’s mostly bad. Everybody hated the Willy Wonka remake. He was the worst thing about Burton’s Alice in Wonderland movies. And, my god, they were so bad.

 Still, we get this bizarre trailer for a movie that seems engineered entirely around being the “grand return to Hollywood” vehicle for a man who has had to suffer though six long years of not being cast in a major motion picture. There is absolutely no appetite for another film adaptation of A Christmas Carol, let alone a god damn prequel. A full third of A Christmas Carol is already Scrooge’s origin story! You know the whole Ghost of Christmas Past thing that revisits his entire background? I’m almost certain that the whole point of this thing was to find a wacky character in the public domain for Johnny Depp, specifically, to play in a movie, and to be the entire selling point of that movie.

 So, considering that Johnny Depp is kind of a shit actor, what’s the purpose of all this? Who is this movie actually for?

 I think that the answer is political and I think it has a lot to do with David Ellison.

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I wrote a little while back about why I don’t think the American right will ever take over the entertainment industry even though a large amount of their grievance culture is geared toward the dismantlement of Woke Hollywood, and I mentioned that there doesn't seem to be any serious effort being made on that front, but I think I spoke too soon.

 Billionaire David Ellison is a Trump puppet who has been gobbling up major media properties in one of the most nakedly corrupt examples of government seizing control of private industry since the fall of the Soviet Union. He took over Paramount with the promise of turning its associated properties into MAGA propaganda, and he’s currently engaged in a hostile takeover of Warner Brothers, again with the help of the president.

Since the Paramount deal, Ellison notoriously installed Bari Weiss, a Trump ally opinion columnist with no newsroom experience, as the head of CBS News and 60 Minutes, resulting in a noticeable and forced ideological shift to the right.

 Now Trump is also making personal demands that Ellison direct Paramount’s film production studio (which will soon also include Warner Brothers, putting Ellison in charge of a huge fraction of the American film industry) to make movies that are more masculine and driven by strong male heroes.

 I can’t prove this is all part of the same scheme but it’s definitely notable that, in the immediate aftermath of Ellison’s acquisition, Paramount Pictures began development, not only on a Johnny Depp comeback vehicle, but also comeback vehicles for both director Brett Ratner and screenwriter Max Landis.

 Brett Ratner (with a single exception that we’ll get to in a minute) hasn’t made a film since 2014, shortly before he was accused by something like a dozen women of varying degrees of sexual misconduct up to and including stuff that, I dunno, sounds pretty much like rape to me.

 The exception, which carries an asterisk because I’m unsure of whether it counts as a real movie, is 2026’s Melania, a documentary nobody asked for about a person nobody cares about. Ratner, who hadn’t directed a documentary before, was hand-picked to direct the predictable box office disaster about the president’s wife, seemingly as a favor to him. Jeff Bezos then paid Trump $40 million for the rights to distribute the movie that he knew very well would not make back even half of that. You can see why I’m reluctant to call this a movie, when it’s actually a Mel Brooks plotline that somehow played out in reality.

 Anyway, after this debacle, Trump went ahead and called Larry Ellison up to pretty much instructed him to hire Ratner to create, uh, Rush Hour 4.

And what can be said about Max Landis? I actually have an oddly short degree of separation from Landis, because about 20 or so years ago he used to post on a forum that I administered, David Wong’s Pointless Waste of Time, which was the personal website of the author Jason Pargin. He was such a legendarily awful dipshit that none of us actually believed he was who he said he was: the son of the famous director John Landis. I don’t think I was the one who personally banned him, but nevertheless everyone’s jaws dropped when the same Twitter account that had belonged to this weasel, a few years later, started posting selfies with the likes of Simon Pegg.

 What wasn’t too surprising was when Landis, around the same time as Ratner, was revealed to be a psychopathic sexually abusive monster. He also lost all his Hollywood projects until last year when the newly Ellison-helmed Paramount called him up to request that Landis pen them a script for a G.I. Joe movie.

 Just recently, the studio decided to pass on Landis’ screenplay. I guess it was bad? But they have taken the odd step of insisting that his leaving the project has nothing to do with him being a sexually abusive monster. The question is, was that the reason he was hired in the first place?

This phenomenon goes beyond Paramount. As I’ve written not long ago, alleged rapist and spousal abuser Armie Hammer has just come blazing back from Hollywood exile in B-movie director Uwe Boll’s Citizen Vigilante, which is all about killing Muslims. Just recently, Ben Shapiro’s Daily Wire film studio released a trailer featuring convicted spouse-beater Jonathan Majors starring in Run Hide Fight: Infidels, which is all about killing Muslims.

I think it’s important to note that none of these men, to the best of my knowledge, have been outspoken in espousing right-wing views. The films with which they are involved may or may not be, to varying degrees, explicitly political (especially the last two I mentioned) but when it comes to the hiring choices, this isn’t exactly the same thing as putting Dennis Quaid and Jon Voight in a Reagan biopic.

 The mission isn’t to have right-wing creators helm right-wing entertainment. That’s fine—let them cook in the free market. What appears to be happening is that they are sending a message, specifically, that we’re rolling back the MeToo movement. The message, under the administration of the world’s most famous and powerful rapist, is Make Sexual Assault Great Again.

And I really do think that this is a message, not simply a compulsion to give blacklisted media figures work. If that were the case, then I think the elephant in the room would be: where’s Kevin Spacey?

 I don’t think that it’s a stretch to say that Spacey, one of the most high profile casualties of MeToo, is fucking desperate for work. Since his exile from Hollywood in 2017, he’s appeared in indie projects in Croatia, Spain, and Italy, and even went so far as to make his own movie to star in. It’s something called “Holiguards Saga — The Portal of Force.” It… it sounds bad.

 I think that Kevin Spacey would be absolutely thrilled to play some quirky starring role in a doomed but high-budget Paramount film, with a trailer in which he gets to scowl through the fourth wall and say “It’s great to be back,” under floating text that reads: He brought us Frank Underwood, Lester Burnham, and Keyser Söze.

Spacey would probably work for peanuts and not care about political motivations. But the thing is, I just don’t think he fits the profile.

 Among the MeToo-men who are being seduced by right-wing entertainment to work in new projects, little care seems to be paid to whether the individual has been merely accused, found liable, or actually convicted of a crime. They are all welcome back in Trump’s Hollywood. Among the high profile names accused of sexual indecency during this period, Spacey has the rare distinction of having been found not guilty in court for all of the cases brought against him.

 I want to be clear: The reason I’m saying this is not to defend Kevin Spacey, or to make any judgment about the accusations. I only want to point out the distinction between this and all the other men I’ve mentioned today. I believe the reason Ellison, Boll, and Shapiro have no interest in courting Spacey for work is that he’s gay. Even more specifically, that he's gay and many of the men who he is alleged to have assaulted are not.

 Rehabilitating Kevin Spacey is not part of the message that they want to send. A gay or otherwise non-cishet sexual predator is exactly the type of villain that they want you to fear, not reward.

 The message is much more specific than the relaxation of so-called cancel culture. The message is that we’re bringing back male violence against women. It all comes packaged with MAGA’s grand masculinity revival.

 And I think it’s going to fail miserably. That’s what I want you to take away from all this, in the end. These people are all terribly incompetent social engineers whose grand project is already falling into desperation.

 I’m wary of saying that Johnny Depp’s Scrooge movie will bomb, because I’ve just got done ridiculing the right-wing for this exact same prediction regarding The Odyssey, but at the same time … uhh, this is not exactly The Odyssey. Also, I don’t think box office success is remotely the point of this. I think The Message is the point and I think David Ellison is willing to shovel billions of dollars into a furnace to send The Message, and I think the oligarchs’ willingness to bankrupt themselves for The Message will work out very poorly.

 And for Johnny Depp, I kind of love this for him. For all his hubris, to become a dancing puppet for a failing regime. To make funny faces at a camera underneath floating text that reads “Hey, remember when you though this shitty loser was a good actor?”

I'm writing a whole book about efforts of the reactionary right to take over media in the first quarter of the 21st century. The working title is How Geeks Ate the World and if you like this newsletter then you'll probably like my book. If you're unsure, the good news is I’m going to be dropping parts of the draft into this very newsletter as the project comes along—but only for paid subscribers. So if you want to read along in real time, please consider subscribing. Otherwise I’ll be keeping you in the loop.

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