On Wednesday morning, Disney released the extremely overwhelming trailer for Cruella. It is, based on this preview, an evil-girlboss origin story about the 101 Dalmatians character Cruella de Vil, famously portrayed by Glenn Close in the 1996 live-action film. Now Emma Stone, with an accent not unlike Vanessa Hudgens’s in The Princess Switch: Switched Again, has taken on the role.
There’s a lot happening in the trailer, but this is what I gathered after three watches: The film follows a young Cruella, who arrives in the Big City (1970s London?), where she is destined to make a name for herself by wearing scary black clothes to various high-society events. Society’s as-yet-unnamed queen bee, played by Emma Thompson, isn’t pleased with this saucy ingénue stealing the spotlight, so Cruella is rejected.
Despite her efforts, the misfit Cruella just can’t fit in — as evidenced by tons of tear-smeared eyeliner — so she rebels. Cut to the name Cruella graffitied on nice buildings, big explosions, and a voice-over of the titular character identifying herself as “brilliant, bad, and a little bit mad!”
On Twitter, people noted that Stone’s Cruella feels a little like a female Joker, and it’s true that in addition to the arson, the trailer has strong “Society, man” energy. Others drew comparisons between Stone’s performance as Cruella and Margot Robbie as Harley Quinn in Birds of Prey and goth Jenny Humphrey from Gossip Girl.
But who knows, maybe this was just an alarming supercut. We’ll have to wait until May to see: