The clock struck eight this morning and the world stopped spinning for exactly two minutes and forty-seven seconds. That is the length of the first full trailer for Disney’s live-action Tangled, and in those 167 seconds the internet fell in love all over again, harder, deeper, and more helplessly than anyone thought possible fifteen years after the animated film first stole our childhood hearts.

This is not a remake. This is a resurrection.

From the very first frame, director Bill Condon makes it clear he understands the assignment on a cellular level. The screen is black. A single paintbrush, held by a trembling hand, drags sunlight across cold stone. Amanda Seyfried’s voice, soft and aching and instantly recognisable, floats through the darkness before we ever see her face.

“I’ve painted every sunrise I was never allowed to touch. I’ve sung to birds that flew away without me. Eighteen years in this tower… and I still don’t know what my own heartbeat sounds like when it’s free.”

Then the camera rises, slowly, reverently, and there she is: Rapunzel, high above the world, seventy feet of living gold spilling from her head like captured sunlight. Seyfried, luminous at forty, stands at the window with tears glistening in eyes that have spent a lifetime looking out but never belonging. The hair moves with her breath, coiling and uncoiling like something alive, something that has protected her and imprisoned her in the same endless embrace.

The orchestra creeps in, Alan Menken’s familiar chords reborn as something grander, more dangerous. Rapunzel wraps her hair around the beam, grabs her only tether to the earth she has never walked. She hesitates for one heartbeat, two, then whispers the line that has already shattered a million hearts on repeat:

“I spent my life watching the world from a window… but not anymore.”

She jumps.

The fall is merciless. The camera dives with her, wind screaming, hair streaming, meadow rushing up to meet her, until she swings in a perfect arc and lands laughing and sobbing at once in an explosion of wildflowers. The title slams onto the screen in molten gold:

TANGLED Summer 2026

And that was just the first thirty seconds.

Then Chris Evans swaggers in, and everything gets worse (in the best possible way).

He appears boots first, brown leather scuffed just enough, satchel slung over one shoulder, that half-cocked smirk already weaponised. Chris Evans has spent years playing noble soldiers and righteous heroes, but here he slips into Flynn Rider’s skin like he was born smug and heartbreakingly vulnerable beneath it.

“Here’s the thing about wanted posters,” he drawls, tossing the stolen crown from hand to hand, “they never quite get the eyes right.”

The moment he rounds the corner and comes face-to-frying-pan with Rapunzel, the air changes. You don’t just see the spark; you feel it in your bones. Their first exchange is pure lightning:

“I will use this.” “You’ve got seventy feet of weaponised hair and you’re threatening me with cookware? I’m in love.”

Later, inside the Snuggly Duckling, Evans takes the new verse Lin-Manuel Miranda wrote for him and sings it like a confession he’s been carrying for years. When he reaches the line “I stole a crown to buy back the life I lost,” his voice breaks on the word lost, and every thug in the tavern, every single one, suddenly has something in his eye.

But the moment that has already spawned ten million TikTok duets comes on the lake, under a sky bleeding lantern light. Rapunzel’s hair is braided with flowers, floating around them like a halo. Evans leans in until their foreheads almost touch and says, so quietly the microphone barely catches it:

“I’ve spent my whole life running from everything that mattered. I’m not running anymore. I’m staying with her, no matter how far this fight goes.”

The camera circles them in one unbroken, impossible shot while thousands of lanterns rise like stars returning home. When Seyfried finally sings the first notes of “I See the Light,” her voice cracks on the word see, and there is not a dry eye in any cinema, living room, or subway carriage currently playing the trailer on loop.

This is not nostalgia bait. This is alchemy.

Bill Condon, the man who turned Beauty and the Beast into a billion-dollar dream, has outdone himself. The tower is real: 120 feet of hand-built stone draped with sixty thousand silk strands that move with hidden wind machines. Corona is Bavaria at golden hour, stitched together with LED walls so seamless you’ll swear you can smell the pine. Rapunzel’s hair glows when she’s happy, darkens when she’s afraid, and ignites like molten sunrise when she heals. In one sequence she lashes it across a collapsing cavern to save Flynn, and the strands ripple like liquid fire across the IMAX screen.

The palette is richer, moodier, more adult. Sunrise corals bleed into storm-soaked indigo. Mother Gothel (Donna Murphy, more venomously tender than ever) strokes that golden hair and whispers, “The world will only ever want you for this,” in a scene so intimate and cruel it hurts to watch. And when Rapunzel finally stands on the castle balcony at dawn, short brown hair whipping in the wind, whispering “This is what the sun feels like on my own skin,” the cut to black is so perfectly timed that theaters have reported actual applause breaking out in the darkness.

The new songs are devastating. “Not Anymore,” Rapunzel’s declaration of rebellion, is already the most-streamed Disney track of the year before the film has even opened. The healing incantation has been slowed to a minor key lament that Seyfried delivers while cradling a dying Flynn, and grown adults are openly weeping in the comments.

By noon the numbers were obscene: 187 million views, 14 million TikTok sounds, Fandango crashing twice under pre-sale demand. Fan edits layering the live-action lantern scene over the animated one have collectively hit a billion views, each caption the same: “They didn’t just remake Tangled. They made it grow up with us.”

Fifteen years ago, a cartoon princess taught us to dream of floating lights. Now she’s all grown up, hair finally her own, ready to burn the sky down if that’s what freedom costs.

And we will be right there in the front row, crying, cheering, falling in love all over again.

Mark your calendars. Clear your summer. Bring tissues. Bring your inner child. Bring every person you’ve ever wanted to see the lights with.

Because when Tangled arrives on 24 July 2026, the lanterns won’t just be lit. They’ll be blazing.