career injection

The Hulk. Will Marvel’s green giant catch a break and get his own movie?

The last time we saw the Hulk, the emerald icon was in flight, fleeing the Avengers because his moods were a liability. But where is he off to? Towards a secret headline gig? Or did Marvel just get meta? Maybe Bruce Banner was right: maybe the MCU is safer without him for a while.

Right now, it looks like the Hulk is being sidelined. His Captain America: Civil War slot met the snip – and a Guardians Of The Galaxy Vol. 2 cameo seems equally unlikely. Fans thought Banner was heading to a riff on Greg Pak’s Planet Hulk comic at Age Of Ultron’s climax. Prime positioning for a GOTG2 showing, right? Wrong: “Zero chance,” director James Gunn tweeted.

If Marvel is scared of the Hulk, it’s no surprise. There are rights issues with Universal, but the bigger barrier is, surely, the Hulk’s solo movie career to date. Ang Lee’s Hulk was underrated but tonally wobbly; Louis Leterrier’s The Incredible Hulk was leaner but sillier; both served cold Bruce Banners. Joss Whedon later addressed the issue by casting the innately likeable Mark Ruffalo and using mo-cap to keep him present in the greenery. Equally ingeniously, the Hulk’s value to the Avengers mirrored his value to the film – as a WMD to deploy sparingly, a useful asset so long as he didn’t go rogue. Problem solved? Not quite. Even Joss Whedon still sees the Hulk as a storytelling challenge: half-monster, half-hero. As for Planet Hulk, a CGI-heavy space fantasy pitched between Gladiator and John Carter would be a high-stakes, high-cost gamble, especially with so much Ruffalo-hued goodwill banked – after all, Planet Hulk suppresses Banner’s input.

But Hulk history is reassuring. The Hulk seemed dead when his debut comics run in 1962 was canned after six issues. By the late ’60s and the ’70s TV show, he was huge again: a mild-mannered, anti-establishment hero seemed to strike a chord.

Looking beyond the movie stumbles, Marvel could learn from those and other eras. A 1969-vintage Sub-Mariner story could follow the Hulk’s ocean fall nicely; an adaptation of Mark Waid’s The Indestructible Hulk could segue into Inhumans. Ruffalo has implied Marvel has plans, attributing Hulk’s low profile to secrecy: “They don’t want to reveal where he is and why.” Whatever the reason, the Hulk can’t be suppressed: but careful handling is crucial. KH