The first full trailer for Glen Powell's next starring vehicle dropped Tuesday morning, and within an hour, film Twitter had split into two camps: the people who can't wait to buy a ticket, and the people who swear they've already seen this exact performance three summers in a row.
The clip runs two minutes and fourteen seconds, and it leans hard on the things Powell does best: a cocky smirk, a perfectly timed quip, and at least one shot of him running away from something exploding.
Fans of his recent run of crowd-pleasers will recognize the formula instantly.
The backlash, such as it is, isn't really about quality.
Quote tweets piled up arguing that Hollywood has decided Powell is a genre unto himself, and that the genre has maybe two settings.
A popular reply compared the trailer to "a playlist where every song is the same three chords, but honestly the chords are pretty good." To be fair to Powell, the trailer does hint at a darker turn in the third act.
There's a brief shot of him staring at something off-camera with an expression that suggests the movie wants to be taken seriously.
Whether audiences buy that after ninety minutes of charm is the real question the trailer is quietly asking.
The timing is also doing the movie no favors.
It arrives the same week two other studio tentpoles dropped teasers, and the comparison game started immediately.
One of those trailers is going viral for its visual effects.
The other is going viral because nobody can figure out what the plot actually is.
Powell's is going viral because people have opinions about him.
Trailers that generate arguments tend to generate ticket sales, and the discourse has been mostly affectionate.
The most-liked comment under the studio's post isn't a complaint.
It's a GIF of Powell shrugging, captioned "fine, I'll go." There's also a quieter factor at play: the movie isn't a franchise, a reboot, or a sequel.
In a summer stacked with IP, an original star vehicle with a recognizable face attached is its own kind of gamble.
If it works, Powell cements the thing studios have been chasing since Tom Cruise aged out of sprinting.
If it doesn't, the "same guy again" jokes write themselves.
The trailer has already cleared a milestone most studios only dream about, racking up millions of views in under a day and trending in multiple countries.
Whether that translates into opening weekend is a different math problem altogether. **Our take:** The internet loves to complain about movie stars doing the same thing twice, right up until the box office proves they didn't actually mind.
Powell has charm to burn and a trailer that's already doing its job.
The only real risk here isn't repetition.
Final Thoughts
It's the third act, which the trailer is careful not to show.