It's a generally accepted fact that this is Beyoncé's world, and we just live in it. This was cemented on December 13, 2013, when Queen Bey dropped her self-titled album with literally no warning at all.

It was totally bananas, and quite literally changed the way that the music industry works. Since then, several other artists have released surprise albums, like Miley at the end of this year's Video Music Awards. Game: changed.

Which leads us to wonder: could the same thing ever happen with a movie? Is it possible to keep a months-long shoot and the ensuing edit a secret, and emerge with a fully-formed movie?

Perhaps "The Big Short," based on the non-fiction book of the same title by Michael Lewis, is as close as we'll come to a Beyoncé-style movie release in a while. Directed by Adam McKay and starring the likes of Ryan Gosling, Brad Pitt, Steve Carell and Christian Bale, it felt like we heard only a whisper of casting in January, then nothing.

That is, until Tuesday (September 22), when the first trailer dropped online, revealing that the film comes out in about 10 minutes, on Christmas Day. Even crazier, the movie will premiere at AFI Fest in mid-November.

P.S., that's less than a year after we even knew Gosling would be in it. That's insane turnaround.

Director McKay told MTV News that he was sure the super-quick release date would leak before the trailer's premiere.

"It's impossible," he said. "I talked to the people at Paramount yesterday, and I was like, in a million years I never imagined this wouldn't leak. I thought for sure a couple weeks back, maybe three weeks ago when we started going, 'let's do this,' I thought oh, for sure it's going to leak, and that's OK. Let's just get our movie out, focus on the movie. And I saw a ton of headlines with the word surprise in it, and had a bunch of friends like, 'woah, what happened, where did this come from?' It's definitely an albino crocodile in this world we live in, a rare thing. Especially with a movie."

A 2015 release hadn't always been in the cards for "The Big Short."

"It was very strange the way it went down. We kind of came into it with no schedule in mind, kind of playing center field waiting to see which way the ball breaks," McKay said. "Fine, if we could get it out earlier we would, but I think we all were thinking it would be out in March [2016], maybe go for some international festivals."

But then the film's editor turned around a rough cut in less than two months, and the filmmakers were stunned at what they saw.

"I've never experienced this before, but, oh my god, chunks of this are already working," McKay said of the editor's assembly. "Then we put it together, made cuts, and had a screening of it for ourselves. Like, wait a minute, is this actually playing? And I did a crazy thing and just told the studio, 'hey, I'm going to recruit an audience, come watch it with us.' Everyone was like, 'are you nuts? No one ever shows the studio that early.'"

The studio evidently also liked what they saw and slapped a Christmas Day release date on the film, officially stamping the film an Oscar contender in the minds of critics.

As for the film itself, McKay said audiences can expect to have a better understanding of the financial crisis, which he said was "really not that tricky." However, don't expect a spiritual sequel to "The Wolf of Wall Street." Ryan Gosling will be hurling zero lobsters in "The Big Short."

"These are the guys that were outside that," McKay said. "These are the guys with the schlubby clothes and the bad haircuts, the guys who are kind of nervous or loudmouths. They actually believed in the system, believed in the market. They were not having crazy stripper parties, and that stuff was definitely going on. You maybe catch a little flicker of it in the background of the movie. I loved 'Wolf of Wall Street,' but that's a totally different side of the story."

So what can we expect to see from Gosling, Pitt, Carell and co.?

"It's the guy in your class your junior year in high school who no one was particularly crazy about, but then seven years later you're like oh, he invented... some new surgical technique, and all along he knew what he was talking about, and we all found him annoying. You're like, wait a minute, how am I judging the worth of people? Maybe it isn't a good haircut and a jawline. That's these guys."

"The Big Short" hits theaters December 25.