Marvel fans assemble.

Today sees the release of a trailer for the next Avengers film. Not the film itself. That's ages away yet. Just the trailer. How do I know? Because I caught the trailer for the trailer last week.

There is no better reflection of how deeply ingrained the blockbuster mentality - and its increasing tailoring towards a geek culture audience - is than the fact that even trailers are now events in themselves and come with their own advance hype.

It also reminds us how deeply ingrained the movie trailer itself is in our film culture. Dating back to 1913 the movie advert (which is what trailers are, after all) remains one of the principal promotional devices for films, on show in your local Cineworld and since the 1970s (thanks to the success of its use in promoting Steven Spielberg's Jaws) on TV too. If anything, they're more widespread now than they ever have been thanks to the reach of the internet

The trailer can trace its history to a 1913 Coney Island screening of a cliffhanger serial The Adventures of Kathlyn. The serial was followed by an "epilogue" that wondered if Kathlyn would survive, encouraging customers to return next week to find out. A tradition was born.

Six years later The National Screen Service was set up in the US and would enjoy a four-decade monopoly producing promo trailers for Hollywood studios often to a standardised pattern using voiceovers and screen wipes. The voiceover has remained an industry standard, it's most notable practitioner Don LaFontaine, "Thunder Throat," voiced more than 5,000 film trailers between 1964 and his death in 2008.

In the sixties the idea of what a trailer could be began to diversify as directors began to wield more power. And so Alfred Hitchcock, probably better known for his TV series Alfred Hitchcock Presents than any of the stars of his film Psycho, could be (almost) the only person seen in the trailer jauntily discussing what viewers might see if they come to see the film and perhaps luring the viewer into a false sense of security before the trailer's final cut and that insistent Bernard Herrman music.

Stanley Kubrick, meanwhile, used pop art techniques in his trailer for Dr Strangelove while for The Shining in 1980 the trailer consisted of a single ominous shot of art deco elevator doors and Krzystof Penderecki's nails-down-a-blackboard music. That auteur tradition continues to the present day. Director Paul Thomas Anderson asked singer Joanna Newsom to narrate the trailer for his new film Inherent Vice.

But the art of the trailer reacts to the culture around it. By the 1980s influence of MTV and music videos was making an impact in the amount of fast cuts in trailers (and eventually films themselves) and over the last 20 years the trailer has been about highlighting the moment that the makers hope will get you into the cinema - the film's "money shot" (a term Hollywood has stolen from pornography). And so, for example, we get to see the White House destroyed in the trailer for Independence Day. The question is, Marvel fans, does that not qualify as a spoiler?