A Christmas Carol is one of those stories everyone knows about and few have actually read. That’s a shame, as the Charles Dickens novella is one of his best works: tough, thrilling, and dramatic without being too dark or saccharine. It’s the perfect story for Christmas, which can conjure feelings of warm sentiment as well as cold reflection.
One thing A Christmas Carol is not, however, is laugh-out-loud funny. That’s where Scrooged comes in. The 1988 movie starring Bill Murray as a modern version of Ebenezer Scrooge is full of cutting-edge humor, both dark and bawdy, and yet it somehow remains faithful to Dickens’ vision of a haunted Christmas Eve that is followed by a dark night of the soul and a redemptive Christmas morning.
If you want to watch Billy Murray be visited by three ghosts, there are two main platforms where you can watch it for free with a subscription. Paramount+ and Amazon Prime Video are the current streaming homes for Scrooged.
While Scrooged may lure you to Paramount+, there are many more shows and movies available on the platform to make your subscription worth your while. Shows like The Good Fight, Star Trek: Discovery, Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, and The Twilight Zone and hit movies like The Lost City, Orphan: First Kill, and Sonic the Hedgehog 2 are just a few of the titles that you won’t want to miss.
Prime Video has a considerable library of its own with originals like The Tomorrow War, The Peripheral, Fleabag, Jack Ryan, and the worldwide hit The Rings of Power. Prime’s library also includes classic films like the James Bond films and The 40-Year Old Virgin.
Scrooged is currently streaming on both platforms.
That depends on what kind of plan and platform you prefer. To take advantage of the free trial, simply head to the Paramount+ website and sign up here. Your first seven days will be free, but after the trial period, subscription plans start as low as $5 per month. That option (called “Essential”) comes with limited commercial interruptions. If you don’t want any ads, the Premium monthly subscription will cost you $10 a month.
You can save money if you commit to a one-year subscription, too. An Essential annual subscription is $50 a year while a Premium annual subscription is $100.You can also bundle the Paramount+ subscription with a Showtime subscription for $12 a month or $120 a year. For more info on all Paramount+ subscription plans, click here.
For Amazon Prime Video, it costs $9 a month just for the Prime Video service.
Yes, and you don’t have to be in the holiday mood either. Scrooged stands on its own as a ripe satire of 1980s consumer culture, with Murray never better as a slimeball TV executive who has disdain for just about everybody. That Scrooged is also a terrific Christmas movie that cleverly updates Dickens’s classic is just icing on the gingerbread house.
In addition to Murray, the film stars Karen Allen, Alfre Woodard, John Glover, Robert Mitchum, the Solid Gold Dancers (yep, that’s a thing), and Carol Kane as the Ghost of Christmas Present. Scrooged was directed by Richard Donner and runs 100 minutes.
The movie has a Rotten Tomatoes critics score of 69% and an audience score of 71%.
China just gave Hollywood a cautionary tale about AI filmmaking. Sanxingdui: Future Past, billed as the country's first fully AI-generated movie, hit theaters on October 23 and bombed at the box office.
According to Futurism, the film's reported $1.5 million production budget landed on more than 10,000 screens. Yet it pulled in only about $181,000, averaging roughly $20 per screen, making the budget difficult to recover.
Some of the best shots in Grok Imagine’s AI-made Odyssey don’t contain actors. Ancient landscapes stretch into the distance. Close-ups of grimy hands suggest people who have touched something rougher than a keyboard. For a few seconds, the illusion holds.
https://twitter.com/imagine/status/2113712964419063911
YouTube videos could soon look better without eating quite so much data, right? Thankfully, the platform plans to introduce a new video format called AV2 on its web player in early 2027, promising more efficient streaming and potentially fewer playback hiccups on slower internet connections. The big headline is a roughly 30% improvement in compression efficiency over AV1, YouTube's existing video format. That doesn't guarantee every video will use 30% less data, but it could make streaming a little easier on both internet connections and data allowances.
What is AV2, and why should viewers care?