Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol in six weeks in 1843, and it has been on screen more or less ever since. Nobody agrees on how many versions exist, because nobody agrees on what counts: the silent shorts, the cartoons, the soap-opera specials, the films that borrow the ghosts and drop the rest. What matters in December is a shorter list. These are the eleven worth your evening, in our order, plus the new one arriving in November.
Jump to: The Muppet Christmas Carol · Scrooge (1951) · A Christmas Carol (1984) · Scrooged · Scrooge (1970) · A Christmas Carol (1999) · A Christmas Carol (2009) · Blackadder's Christmas Carol · A Christmas Carol (2019) · Mickey's Christmas Carol · Spirited · Ebenezer (2026)
1. The Muppet Christmas Carol (1992)
The best Carol on film, and it is not especially close. Michael Caine plays Scrooge completely straight, as if nobody had told him the rest of the cast were made of felt, and that single decision holds the whole thing together. The songs are better than they need to be. More of Dickens's own prose survives than in most straight versions, read out by a narrator who takes the job seriously, and the Christmas Yet to Come sequence is properly eerie. It was shot at Shepperton, which makes it as British as it feels.
It scores 96/100 Festive Factor.
The Muppet Christmas Carol · Film guide →2. Scrooge (1951)
Our pick for the definitive live-action Carol, and this Christmas is its seventy-fifth. Alastair Sim plays the change as something close to a breakdown: the morning after, he is a man frightened into joy, giggling at himself in the mirror. The screenplay fills in more of Scrooge's early years than most versions bother with, so you can watch the hardening happen. Black and white, eighty-six minutes, no fat.
It has been on Channel 5 every Christmas from 2021 to 2025, so it is usually free to watch. 87/100 Festive Factor.
Scrooge · Film guide →3. A Christmas Carol (1984)
Made for American television and shot in Shrewsbury, which is why its streets look like an English market town rather than a studio lot. George C. Scott gives the most grown-up Scrooge on this list: not a pantomime miser but a hard, clever businessman who thinks he is right. It keeps closest to the book's structure of any version here, which is why it is the one people mean when they ask for the accurate Carol.
4. Scrooged (1988)
The angriest Carol, and when it lands, the funniest. Bill Murray plays a television executive staging the story live on Christmas Eve while the ghosts stage it on him. The network satire is sharper than it gets credit for and the middle hour is genuinely vicious. The tone lurches, and the closing speech runs well past comfortable. It turns up on Channel 4 some Christmases. 89/100 Festive Factor.
Scrooged · Film guide →5. Scrooge (1970)
The musical, with Albert Finney, then in his thirties, ageing up to play Scrooge, and Alec Guinness as Marley. Leslie Bricusse's songs are the draw, and the best of them stay in the head for days. It runs long and the hell sequence is a strange detour, but it has a warmth the straighter versions sometimes lack.
6. A Christmas Carol (1999)
Patrick Stewart had been touring a one-man stage reading of the book for years before he made this television film, and it shows: he knows every beat of the text. It is handsome and a little solemn: the version for someone who wants the story told properly, without songs or puppets. It turns up on Channel 4 or 5 in some years.
7. A Christmas Carol (2009)
The Carol that goes hardest on the ghost story. Robert Zemeckis made it with performance capture, which lays a faint glassiness over every face that either deepens the unease or spoils it, depending on your tolerance. Jim Carrey plays Scrooge and all three spirits, and the flights over the rooftops of London make you grip the sofa. The least cosy version here, by design. 87/100 Festive Factor.
A Christmas Carol · Film guide →8. Blackadder's Christmas Carol (1988)
The BBC's inversion, and one of the cleverest things anyone has done with the book. Rowan Atkinson plays the kindest man in Victorian London, and the spirit who visits him accidentally teaches him that kindness gets you nowhere. Forty-odd minutes long. Not a film, but no list of British Carols is honest without it.
9. A Christmas Carol (2019)
The BBC's three-part version, written by Steven Knight, with Guy Pearce as a Scrooge whose meanness has consequences far darker than anything Dickens wrote. It is bleak and expensive-looking, determined not to be cosy, and it will split a family sofa straight down the middle. Worth it for anyone who thinks they know the story too well.
10. Mickey's Christmas Carol (1983)
About twenty-five minutes of Disney shorthand, and a surprisingly good first Carol for small children. It hits every beat of the story at speed, and the ghosts are more comic than frightening. A good way in before a longer version.
11. Spirited (2022)
The newest one already out, and the most knowing. Will Ferrell and Ryan Reynolds lead an Apple musical about the spirits themselves, treating the haunting as an annual operation with staff and targets. It is too long and too pleased with itself, though two or three of the numbers stick.
Coming in November: Ebenezer: A Christmas Carol (2026)
Ti West, better known for horror, directs Johnny Depp as Scrooge, with Ian McKellen, Daisy Ridley and Rupert Grint in the cast. It was shot in the UK and opens in British cinemas on 13 November. West's films lean on dread, so expect this one to sit nearer the 2009 version than the Muppets. We will score it once we have seen it.
How we ranked them
Our order weighs how well each version tells the story against how good it is to watch on a December evening. Four of these are in our catalogue and carry a Festive Factor, scored on the same rubric as every film on the site: the Muppets, Scrooge (1951), Scrooged and the 2009 version. The rest will be scored as they join. The free-to-air lines come from our own check of the main-channel Christmas listings for 2021 to 2025.
