This time, though, it's on screen, though the echoes of the real-life drama off screen are hard to miss.

The first full trailer for Robert Zemeckis's World War 2 espionage thriller Allied has been released, revealing significant plot details that appear to mirror elements of the Brangelina split.

Pitt plays Max Vatan, a US spy sent to Casablanca to assassinate a German official. There he is teamed with Marianne Beausejour (Marion Cotillard), a French Resistance fighter who pretends to be his wife. In the course of their mission they fall in love.

Unwilling to accept that what happens in Casablanca stays in Casablanca, Vatan convinces Beausejour to follow him to London and marry him for real. They have a child and settle into domestic bliss, or as close to that state as wartime allows. And then comes the bombshell: his superiors believe she is a German spy, and order him to kill her.

It has been suggested that Allied is the film that ended Pitt's relationship to Angelina Jolie after 12 years, with rumours that the actor and his co-star, Cotillard, began an affair while working together.

If true, there's a bizarre echo in that not just of the movie's plot but also of the origins of the Jolie-Pitt relationship itself, which is widely believed to have begun while they were making their first film together, Mr and Mrs Smith, in 2004.

Like Allied, it is a tale (albeit a comedic one) of married assassins.

Pitt and Jolie played married assassins in the comedy Mr and Mrs Smith, released in 2005.

Pitt and Jolie have six children together, three of them adopted. They were married in August 2014, having previously stated they would not wed until same-sex marriage was legal. The United States Supreme Court ruled state bans on same-sex unions were unconstitutional – effectively legalising gay marriage – in June 2015.

Last year, the couple finally starred in their second film together. By the Sea was written and directed by Angelina Jolie Pitt, as she was for the first time credited, and was the story of a couple whose relationship was in deep crisis. She played a former dancer saddened by the fact her writer husband (Pitt) appeared more interested in drinking than in having sex with her.

Pitt and Jolie as a couple in crisis in 2015's By the Sea.

In the wake of the Brangelina split, unsubstantiated rumours surfaced that Pitt had a "substance abuse" problem. He has denied that, and the official reason for their split remains nothing more than "irreconcilable differences".

That may be as much as we ever know for certain, and Pitt and Jolie have as much right to privacy on that front as anyone else. But when the line between their art and their lives is so often blurred, people can be forgiven for wondering where the make-believe blends with the real.

Allied is only likely to fuel that speculation.

Karl Quinn is on facebook at karlquinnjournalist and on twitter @karlkwin