Hulking success

It’s high time the green guy got star status

Where does the Incredible Hulk go from Ragnarok?

The success of Marvel Studios’ gamma-radiated giant in Thor: Ragnarok — as well as his appearances the Avengers films — proves the Hulk still has bigscreen potential.

What isn’t clear is if the Hulk will continue to be a guest star, or if he’ll once again star in his own movie as he did back in the early days of Marvel Studios.

(The Incredible Hulk, starring Edward Norton, debuted in 2008. I won’t mention 2003’s Hulk starring Eric Bana because I’m trying to convince you Hulk movies work.)

Mark Ruffalo — the only actor who has played Bruce Banner/ Hulk in multiple movies — said in July that a Hulk movie won’t happen because Universal doesn’t want to collaborate with Marvel Studios.

If Marvel Studios wants to use Hulk in a movie, it must be in a guest star/team-up way; if it wants to make a solo effort, Universal (who has the rights to a solo Hulk movie) would have to be involved.

Marvel Studios has proven it can share with others with the successful reboot of Spider-Man.

During the early days of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, no one thought Spider-Man would be able to appear in an Avengers movie because the web-slinger’s rights belonged to Sony.

But Marvel Studios made a bold move to collaborate, and Sony realized it was in danger of tarnishing the Spider-Man movie brand. Both sides made it work. You can almost understand Universal’s hesitation to revisit the Hulk on film: Hulk movies aren’t the shining example of how to make a good superhero movie.

If there’s one blip in the MCU, it’s Norton’s The Incredible Hulk movie.

Not even Robert Downey Jr.’s post-credit appearance could help.

And while the storyline moved the MCU-connected movieverse along, it didn’t leave anyone hungry for more Hulk.

It’s possible Universal feels there are no more Hulk stories to tell, and that revisiting the character in a solo movie wouldn’t work.

But if that’s the mentality, that just means Universal doesn’t have any comic-book people, like Marvel Studios does with Kevin Feige or Warner Bros./DC Entertainment does with Geoff Johns. It’s important to have people who really care about these characters and can dive through a library’s worth of stories to find the right thing to adapt for the big screen.