When adaptations disappoint expectations: Scrooged (1988), A Christmas Carol (2019) and Charles Dickens’ textual afterlife

Through the years, Charles Dickens’s most famous novella, A Christmas Carol (1841), has been adapted for the screen and television countless times. While some of the adaptations (for example, Robert Zemeckis’s 2009 movie) have enjoyed great success, others were received with hostility, arguably because they moved away from a more ‘traditional’ approach both to the storyline and to the interpretation of the character of Ebenezer Scrooge. This chapter focuses in particular on two of these not so appreciated adaptations and their Italian fortune: the American movie Scrooged (1988) and the British miniseries A Christmas Carol (2019). Drawing on theories from Translation and Adaptations Studies, I examine the translation and dissemination of new interpretations of Dickens’s novella and the role of audience expectations in their fortune.