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With a new trailer announcing that shooting of The Avengers has just begun, are we in danger of suffering hype overload? This week may well go down in history as the most exciting in all of movie history. We’ve been treated to one blockbuster revelation after another. On 24 April it was breathlessly announced that a brand new trailer for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2 would debut on ABC Family during the broadcast of Happy Gilmore on 27 April. And all this week, the Apple trailers site ran a banner trumpeting the 28 April arrival of the brand new Transformers 3 trailer – the film’s third – with an exclusive picture of some metal hovering above some skyscrapers . But, as incredible as these announcements have been, they’ve been blown clean out of the water by the release of the first promotional image from The Avengers. It is, without question, the most exciting picture of four empty chairs that the world has ever seen. And it’s packed with all sorts of tasty information, too. For example, careful examination of the photo reveals that Iron Man, Thor, the Incredible Hulk and Captain America will all appear in The Avengers, and also that these characters will all have arses and should therefore be able to sit in chairs. Spoiler alert! Seriously, though, what’s going on? Didn’t it used to be the case that a trailer was all that was needed to publicise a film, not a news story alerting you to the fact that a trailer would premiere during a middling Adam Sandler film on a channel nobody watches, or a nondescript picture of a robot alerting you to the premiere of a new trailer for a film that you’ve already seen two trailers for, or a picture alerting you to the fact that a film has started shooting footage that may eventually be incorporated into a trailer that you might be able to watch in about eight or nine months? It’s not like we’re in for any great surprises, either. Even before it was released, you could have predicted that the Harry Potter trailer would include shots of Daniel Radcliffe gritting his teeth and Ralph Fiennes saying “Harry Potter” in a creepy voice. Similarly, what could the Transformers 3 trailer possibly have in store for us, aside from even more interminable shots of indistinguishable robots furiously clanking at each other? There’s nothing wrong with studios wanting to build up a bit of buzz around their films, but isn’t buzz supposed to be, you know, buzzworthy? At least more buzzworthy than a photo of some chairs. But maybe I’m wrong. Maybe excited teenagers around the world are currently texting each other things like “Did you see that photo? The Avengers is going to be the best film about four empty chairs ever .” The worst possible outcome of this week’s empty nonsense is that these anticlimactic announcements will somehow catch on. Because what if this is the future? What if every film from now on – every piece of Oscar bait, every low-budget indie favourite, every highbrow literary adaptation – starts counting down to the premiere of its trailer? We’d grow desensitised to it, just as we’ve grown desensitised to trailers being the primary method of publicity. And then the blockbusters would have to crank up the promotional machine even earlier. We’d live in a world where news stories would announce the imminent arrival of news stories that would announce the imminent arrival of a countdown to a trailer, or teaser photos of chair legs designed to whet our appetite for full photos of empty chairs. Enough is enough, surely. Harry Potter Science fiction and fantasy Film industry Action and adventure Stuart Heritage guardian.co.uk