Scrooged

Frank Cross is a wildly successful television executive whose cold ambition and curmudgeonly nature has driven away the love of his life. But after firing a staff member on Christmas Eve, Frank is visited by a series of ghosts who give him a chance to re-evaluate his actions and right the wrongs of his past.

Scrooged landed as a genuinely mixed proposition on release: critics agreed the film is sharpest when Bill Murray is at his most vitriolic and the satire of the television industry has real bite, but the shift into Dickensian redemption divided almost everyone. The ending in particular drew outright hostility from several quarters, and Murray's performance itself split critics between those who found him electrifyingly nasty and those who thought his ad-libbing derailed the whole enterprise.