Could Meryl Streep be dead in Mamma Mia 2?

A new trailer has been released for the ABBA-themed musical Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again - but fans are greeting it with anxiety, not excitement. 

The reason? Meryl Streep hardly appears as Donna, the titular 'mamma', in the promo videos. The first film told the tale of her daughter Sophie's (Amanda Seyfried) quest to work out which of Donna's three former lovers is her father before her wedding on the Greek  island of Kalokairi. 

Sophie returns to the island in the new film, which is both prequel and seque. Via flashbacks, we get the tale of how a younger Donna (played by Darkest Hour and Downton Abbey's Lily James) was wooed by Sam, Harry and Bill in her youth, and in the present day we see Sophie returning to the island with husband Sky (Dominic Cooper) and revealing that she is pregnant.

The joyous announcement seems tinged with a certain sadness though - could this be linked to the fact that Meryl-as-Donna barely appears in the two trailers and has no lines?

Or perhaps it's something to do with the fact that whilst we see her revealing the pregnancy to Sky, and celebrating with her three father-figures (played by Colin Firth, Pierce Brosnan and Stellan Skarsgård) and her mother's friends, we don't see her break the momentous news of a future grandchild to her own mother. 

There's a clip of her hugging Sophie at her wedding that's lifted from the first film, and she isn't there to greet her best friends (Christine Baranski of The Good Wife and Julie Walters) when they get off the boat. Instead it's up to Sophie, who tells them, "I'm so glad you're here. I'm pregnant, but I don't how to do this by myself." Why would she be by herself?

She also tells Brosnan's Sam in a heavy tone: "I can do this if I can just be as brave as my mom was back then."  Whilst impending motherhood can be daunting, unlike Donna she has the support of a husband. So why is she talking about being by herself?  Perhaps she is missing the help and wisdom of her mother. 

Donna's absence seems to be confirmed when Sophie tells Sky: "I have never felt closer to my mom, in the exact same place that she was, all those years ago, only this time we know who the father is." The phrasing is strange - the first film was set at Villa Donna, a hotel on the island that Streep's character owned. Sophie shouldn't just be feeling emotionally close to her mother's younger self, she should be just a stone's throw away from present-day Donna. 

Meryl was definitely involved with the production, as producer Judy Craymer has shared plenty of pictures of her on-set on Instagram, but it's strange that several shots of her in the trailer look as if they could have been pulled from the first ABBA-themed outing. 

In the present-day clips, Donna is repeatedly referred to in the third person and past tense,and much is made of Sophie spending time with her mother's former bandmates Tanya and Rosie, but there are no shots of present-day Donna with them. It's almost as if Donna is gone, and Sophie has taken up her place. 

And why isn't Donna there with everyone else to meet her own mother, a fabulous caricature played by Cher?

This has not gone unnoticed by fans, who have seemed positively griefstricken by the possibility of no more Meryl. 

So what's going on? The official Twitter account is working very hard to ignore fans who ask the obvious question, so it seems we won't know until the film is released in the UK on July 27.