The teaser for next summer's most expensive gamble landed at 9 a.m.
Eastern on Tuesday, and within an hour, "worst CGI I've ever seen" was trending above the movie's own title.
Studio executives reportedly paid for a 30-second Super Bowl spot, but the internet did what the internet does: it froze the frame on a flying creature at the two-second mark and turned it into a meme before lunch.
Fan accounts with less than 5,000 followers racked up millions of views dissecting every pixel.
One user zoomed in on the lead actor's face during an explosion and captioned it "me pretending to care about my performance review." Another posted a side-by-side with a 2008 video game, and that post alone pulled in 40,000 reposts by dinner.
The studio's social team tried to steer the conversation, quote-tweeting a glowing reaction from a friendly outlet.
Fans flooded the replies with screenshots of the same shot, now with red circles drawn around what they insist is a rubbery hand.
The account went quiet for six hours, which, in 2024 terms, is basically a public apology.
A smaller camp argues the trailer is being judged on a compressed YouTube stream rather than the finished theatrical cut, and that early VFX renders almost always look rough. "You all did this exact thing to the last one and then gave it a 92 percent audience score," one viral post pointed out.
That take has its own defenders now, which means the discourse has officially split into two warring factions.
Meanwhile, ticket presales reportedly spiked 18 percent in the first 24 hours — a reminder that outrage and curiosity are the same currency in Hollywood.
The director hasn't commented publicly, though a cryptic Instagram story featuring a single hourglass emoji sent fans into another spiral.
Some read it as a promise of a better second trailer.
The cast has stayed mostly silent too, aside from one supporting actor who liked a tweet calling the backlash "manufactured." Screenshots of that like circulated faster than the trailer itself.
By Wednesday morning, the like was gone, but the receipts were forever.
What's striking is how fast the cycle moves now.
A trailer used to be a two-week conversation.
This one burned through its entire life span in about 14 hours, from hype to backlash to backlash-to-the-backlash to exhausted resignation.
The movie doesn't open for 11 months, which means the studio has roughly 330 days to either fix the effects or convince everyone the effects were never the point.
Our take: the outrage is louder than it is meaningful, and the presales suggest most people already decided to show up.
But studios keep cutting trailers from unfinished footage, and audiences keep punishing them for it.
Final Thoughts
At some point, someone in a boardroom has to ask whether the first impression is worth the free-for-all.