After years of mediocrity, the Hulk finally feels incredible again.
After watching Spider-Man: Brand New Day in theatres recently, I was pleasantly surprised by how the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) treated the Incredible Hulk during his limited screen time. He was bigger, meaner, greener and filled with more rage than I could ever remember. This got me thinking: where has this version of the Hulk been all along? After all, Marvel has featured him in shows and movies numerous times over the years, but I don’t have a single memory of the once-dominant Hulk outside of the first Avengers movie and his 2008 film.
The Incredible Hulk has been my favourite superhero since I was a kid , so I decided to look back at all of his appearances in the MCU since his first film to try and figure out how and why Marvel has buried him in the ground.
My suspicions began to rise in the MCU’s second-ever film, The Incredible Hulk. Beyond what most people think, I believe this is one of Marvel’s best movies, but I can see why it got a negative response upon release. The storyline is a bit basic, and to fans who aren’t as biased toward the Hulk as I am, it can definitely be a distraction from all the other great qualities the film has to offer.
The action, casting, villain and characters are all highlights of the film, often outclassing most Marvel movies to this day. Bruce Banner is great in this movie, with Edward Norton playing him masterfully, capturing the character’s depressing life to a T. However, I focused on the Hulk, as his rage was cranked up a hundred notches whenever he was on screen.
This was the version of the character you’d expect in an on-screen role, given how powerful he was portrayed in some of Marvel’s earliest comic books. He was a brutal monster who grew stronger the angrier he got, ultimately standing tall by the movie’s end despite repeated resistance.
My point here is that his character isn’t supposed to lose.
I dove a bit deeper into the behind-the-scenes of this movie and found out some interesting things, including Norton’s relationship with Marvel and how it led to his departure from the character after this movie. Next, Marvel didn’t actually own the production rights to the Hulk in the first place, which limited their ability to make any standalone Hulk movies after the original. This will be important later on.
Next was The Avengers. This movie depicted the Hulk similarly to the previous one, but with a completely different actor, Mark Ruffalo. It is very strange watching these two movies back-to-back and seeing them played by two different actors, but I slowly started to realize that Norton’s iteration was being completely retconned after his fallout with Marvel.
Ruffalo’s version of the character is also great. Both actors gave it their all with Banner, and it shows. As for the big green guy, he was just as savage and Hulk-esque as I hoped. After The Avengers, however, things went downhill fast.
Avengers: Age of Ultron is where the character’s identity becomes his battle between Banner and the monster. Near the end of the film, the character was essentially written off by flying to another planet and would never be the same for the next 11 years.
Over the next decade-plus, viewers were met with iterations of the Hulk that simply made no sense. All of a sudden, he was getting beaten up by everyone; he was wearing glasses and drinking coffee and even doing yoga with his cousin.
I thought back to the character-rights situation and assumed that because the character isn’t under their full control, they brushed him aside and used him as a punching bag for others. The Hulk was one of the last characters that Marvel didn’t have full rights to after selling them off in the late 90s to different groups. This means that if those rights remain with Universal Studios, we may never see another standalone Hulk film.
Given how deep and emotional Bruce Banner is as a character, and how powerful the Hulk has been on paper, it’s a shame he’s been relegated to such a shell in his on-screen roles since the 2010s.
On the bright side, if Spider-Man: Brand New Day is a sign of what’s to come for the character, then there may be hope. I personally loved how he was treated in the most recent Spider Man film. It was refreshing to see the Hulk at his peak form, detroying anything and everything in his path. In the meantime, there is still no word on whether the character will feature in the upcoming Avengers: Doomsday, making his role in the Spidey movie a one-off.