The teaser clocked more than 40 million views before lunchtime on the East Coast, and the comment section turned into its own spectator sport.
Within minutes, fans were freeze-framing a two-second shot of a rain-soaked street sign and insisting it confirms a long-rumored plot twist.
Studios used to guard trailers like state secrets.
Now they leak a grainy nine-second clip on a Tuesday, watch the internet combust, then "officially" release the full version on Thursday.
The strategy works because the argument is the marketing.
What set this one apart wasn't the explosions or the orchestral swell.
It was a single line of dialogue, delivered off-camera, that nobody could agree on.
The casting news didn't help calm anyone down.
A fan-favorite actor who swore off franchise work two years ago appears in the trailer for exactly four seconds, back to camera, and has already posted a cryptic hourglass emoji.
His representatives have said nothing, which is, of course, saying everything.
Reddit sleuths mapped the trailer's locations against a leaked production schedule and concluded the film spans three decades.
A competing theory says it's all a dream sequence.
One monologue joked that the trailer has more plot than most full movies released this year, and the clip pulled 6 million views overnight.
That's the new ecosystem: the reaction to the trailer is now bigger than the trailer.
Meanwhile, the actual film doesn't arrive for eight months.
That's an eternity in internet time, which means we're about to get a teaser for the teaser, a poster with one obscured face, and at least two "exclusive" behind-the-scenes featurettes before anyone buys a ticket.
The smartest move the studio made was staying silent.
No explainer, no cast interviews, no clarifying statement about the ambiguous line.
Every unanswered question is a free headline, and they know it.
If the movie lands and that mysterious line turns out to mean nothing, the same fans building shrines today will be building complaint threads tomorrow.
Trailers have gotten so good at selling mystery that the payoff rarely matches the puzzle.
For now, the discourse is the product, and business is booming.
The trailer did its job: nobody is talking about anything else, and everyone has an opinion.
Our take: this is masterclass marketing attached to a movie that now has to be genuinely great to survive its own buildup.
Final Thoughts
Enjoy the chaos while it lasts, because the reviews will arrive eventually, and they don't care how many views the teaser got.