Paramount Gave Scrooge a Venmo Account, Proving Studios Confuse Medium With Character

Paramount has built Ebenezer Scrooge a Venmo account.

The character in Ti West's new adaptation, played by Johnny Depp, now receives and sends money through the app as a promotional stunt for the film — real enough that people can actually transfer funds to him. The studio seems to believe this novelty makes Scrooge feel contemporary, relatable, fresh.

It does not. What it actually does is repeat a specific failure from fifteen years ago, when Robert Zemeckis released a motion-capture 3D version of "A Christmas Carol" in 2009, built on the same assumption that technical novelty could resurrect the character by making audiences experience him differently.

The motion-capture technology was revolutionary and the 3D was immersive. None of it mattered because Scrooge himself does not need renovation. He is a perfectly understood character whose entire appeal rests on his static nature and his unambiguous transformation. The Zemeckis film did not fail because the technology was bad — it failed because audiences did not want Scrooge in motion-capture any more than they want him on Venmo. The character's power comes from his frozen, archetypal quality, not from the distribution channel that carries him.

Scrooge has never been about realism.

This is the recurring trap studios fall into. They confuse the medium with the character. A Venmo account suggests Scrooge is a person who exists in 2024, operates within digital infrastructure, participates in the frictionless transaction landscape that defines contemporary life. But Scrooge has never been about realism. He has always been a moral architecture, a before-and-after diagram of greed and redemption. Every technological wrapper around him since 1843 has assumed the same thing. The character needs updating, when actually the character's entire value proposition is that he never does. When a studio needs a Venmo gimmick to sell Dickens, it usually means the casting, the direction. The material itself have not convinced anyone to show up.