Why Hollywood Never Knew What to Do With the Hulk

The Hulk has always presented Hollywood with a pretty unique problem, because unlike Superman, Spider-Man, or Batman, he isn't really a traditional superhero. If you make him too destructive, he stops feeling like a hero, but if you give Bruce Banner too much control over him, you risk removing the very thing that makes the Hulk interesting in the first place.

The Hulk isn't a hero who patrols the streets

Hulk doesn't patrol the streets looking for criminals. He isn't a friendly neighborhood hero helping people out, and he certainly isn't saving cats from trees. He's a giant rage monster who comes out whenever Bruce Banner loses control and usually destroys half of whatever happens to be around him.

That raises a pretty obvious question. How do you build a superhero movie around that? And how do you make audiences connect with and root for a character whose entire appeal is that he gets angry, loses control, and starts smashing everything in sight? To see why Hollywood never knew what to do with him, it helps to look at how one of Marvel's most recognizable characters has been rebooted, recast, and reinvented over and over again.

Ang Lee's Hulk arrived in the shadow of Spider-Man

In 2002, Spider-Man swung onto screens, setting a record for the largest opening weekend in history. That set off a superhero gold rush as every studio in town rushed to copy the film's success, and the first superhero film to follow was Ang Lee's Hulk. However, Hulk was well into production when Spider-Man came out. After seeing Spider-Man, writer and producer James Schamus called Ang Lee and told him, "I think we're in a little trouble."

That's because Spider-Man was funny, romantic, and ultimately a feel good superhero movie built around a character audiences could easily root for. Not only that, coming less than a year after 9/11, the movie ends with Spider-Man swinging in front of a giant American flag, tapping directly into the enormous wave of patriotism sweeping the country at the time. Hulk was nothing like that, but audiences didn't know that as they went in expecting another fun and rousing superhero movie.

Instead, Ang Lee gave them something closer to a psychological family drama about childhood trauma, repression, and generational abuse. In flashbacks, we learn that Bruce Banner's dad tried to kill him after realizing he had passed his mutated DNA to him, believing he's dangerous, only for his mother to intervene and die at the hands of her husband instead. Bruce represses most of these memories, and the Hulk essentially becomes a physical manifestation of all the anger and trauma he has spent his entire life bearing. It's an interesting interpretation of the character, but it also means the movie is incredibly dark, slow, and introspective for something being sold to audiences as a giant green superhero smashing things.

The 2003 Hulk gave him mutated dogs, comic panels and a giant cloud to fight

That approach extends to the Hulk himself, because for most of the movie he isn't really presented as a traditional superhero. He doesn't have a city to protect or a villain he needs to stop. Instead, most of the film is about the military hunting him down while Hulk reacts to whatever is attacking him at the time. Even when the movie finally gives him something to fight, it's three genetically mutated dogs, including a giant Hulk poodle, which became one of the film's most mocked sequences.

Then things get even stranger. Ang Lee tried to make the movie itself look and feel like a comic book. Shots are divided into panels, images overlap each other, scenes transition by sliding across the screen, and sometimes several angles of the same moment play simultaneously. It was an incredibly ambitious attempt to translate the actual visual grammar of comic books into filmmaking, but it was also extremely polarizing. While many fans lauded it, many others criticized it for being incredibly distracting.

Then the movie reaches its climax and gives Hulk perhaps the least satisfying opponent imaginable: a giant cloud. Bruce's father essentially becomes Absorbing Man as he absorbs energy and mutates into an increasingly abstract mass of electricity, water, and rock, until Hulk is effectively fighting a giant collection of visual effects in the sky. After spending more than two hours building toward Bruce finally confronting the father responsible for so much of his trauma, the emotional conflict is buried underneath a climax where it becomes increasingly difficult to even understand what Hulk is punching or what's going on.

The film opened incredibly strong, showing that audience interest was there, but its box office absolutely collapsed in the second weekend as the film's word of mouth totally dried up. As a result, plans for a sequel were canceled, and Eric Bana's career as a leading man never really recovered.

The Incredible Hulk set out to fix Ang Lee's version

Five years later, Marvel decided to try again, and strangely enough, The Incredible Hulk found itself in almost the exact same position as Ang Lee's movie. Just as Hulk had been the first major Marvel movie to follow Spider-Man, The Incredible Hulk was the first movie to follow Iron Man, which had just launched the Marvel Cinematic Universe and become one of the biggest movies of the year. So once again, expectations for the Hulk were incredibly high.

Unlike Ang Lee's movie, Marvel knew they couldn't spend another two hours retelling his origin, so The Incredible Hulk essentially operates as a soft reboot. Producer Gale Anne Hurd would later admit that they even had trouble describing exactly what the movie was, calling it something between a reboot and a sequel. From the beginning, the filmmakers were consciously trying to fix the problems with Ang Lee's version. The comic panels were removed, Bruce Banner was recast with a movie star in Edward Norton, Hulk gets to be a hero in the end as he saves Harlem, and he gets to fight another monster.

Not only that, director Louis Leterrier criticized the design of Ang Lee's Hulk, calling it a day-glo chubby Hulk that looked like a Buddha on steroids. As a result, he made his Hulk leaner, darker, and much more aggressive, which made him more intimidating but also less empathetic. His face is buried under darker tones and deep shadows, with angular features and a much more monstrous design, making it more difficult for audiences to connect with him.

Edward Norton's Bruce Banner and the fight over a longer cut

Norton himself is part of that problem. He's obviously a great actor, but his Bruce Banner never really develops much of a personality outside of being anxious and desperate to get rid of the Hulk. A lot of the time, it just feels like Edward Norton playing Edward Norton. There's nothing particularly distinctive about his Banner, especially compared to how instantly Robert Downey Jr. defined Tony Stark just one movie earlier.

The bigger problem was what happened behind the scenes. Norton had a slightly different idea of what the movie should be, and he wanted a longer and more introspective version that explored his character. For example, the movie was originally supposed to open with Bruce traveling into the Arctic and attempting to kill himself. When the attempt causes him to transform, Hulk emerges instead. The sequence was ultimately removed, with Bruce's backstory condensed into the opening credits, but it shows just how dark Norton wanted to take the character.

Roughly 70 minutes of material was left out of the finished movie, much of it involving additional backstory and character development. That's because after audiences had rejected the slow and introspective 2003 movie, the studio wanted a lean, commercial action film that ran under two hours. In trying so hard not to repeat Ang Lee's mistakes, the studio arguably went too far in the other direction, producing a lightweight, generic superhero movie that moved quickly and delivered more action but stripped away much of the character development and personality Norton was trying to bring to Bruce Banner.

Norton's push for a longer cut created enough tension with Marvel that when Hulk returned for The Avengers, Norton was gone. Kevin Feige publicly announced that the decision was not financial, but was instead about finding an actor who embodied the creativity and collaborative spirit of the rest of the cast. Norton's agent immediately fired back, calling the statement misleading and insisting Norton had wanted to return. Years later, when Norton explained what went wrong with the film, he simply said, "I wanted a better script." Like the 2003 film, the 2008 version also suffered a similar fate at the box office, earning roughly the same amount and also dropping massively in its second weekend.

Mark Ruffalo's Hulk in The Avengers finally got the balance right

Despite The Incredible Hulk underperforming, Marvel wasn't ready to give up on the character. When Hulk returned four years later in The Avengers, Bruce Banner was recast yet again, and this time they finally got it right. Mark Ruffalo's Bruce Banner immediately has more personality than Norton's version. He's awkward, funny, and slightly nervous, but there's also a constant sense that something incredibly dangerous is sitting just underneath the surface.

More importantly, the movie gives his Hulk just enough humanity and humor that audiences finally fell in love with him. When Tony Stark falls unconscious through the portal, Hulk catches him and saves his life. When Captain America tells him to smash, Hulk grins and immediately goes on a rampage through New York. Plus, he delivers arguably the funniest moment in the entire movie by repeatedly slamming Loki into the floor before dismissing him as a puny god.

All of that is set up by probably the best Bruce Banner moment in any of these movies, when Bruce calmly admits that his secret is that he's always angry as he turns around and stops a Leviathan with a single punch. It was exactly the kind of balance the previous two movies had struggled to find. Hulk was dangerous without being completely unlikeable, funny without turning into a joke, and powerful without losing the sense that Bruce was still somewhere inside him. Even writer and director Joss Whedon said at the time that audiences were finally going to feel like they were getting the Hulk they had been waiting for.

From Age of Ultron to She-Hulk, Marvel moved away from what worked

It seemed like Marvel had finally figured it out, and then they immediately started struggling with what to do with him next. In Age of Ultron, one of Hulk's biggest storylines suddenly becomes a romance between Bruce and Natasha, despite the movie doing very little to explain why they had suddenly fallen for each other. After spending an entire movie developing the relationship, Marvel basically abandoned it. Bruce disappears at the end of the film, and when the two eventually reunite years later, the romance never really goes anywhere.

Infinity War then set up what seemed like a major Hulk storyline. Within the first few minutes, Thanos beats him so badly that Hulk refuses to come back out for the rest of the movie. That not only established how terrifying Thanos was, but also planted the seeds for Hulk to eventually get his revenge. During the Battle of Wakanda, Banner was supposed to finally reach an understanding with Hulk while trapped inside the Hulkbuster armor, and Smart Hulk would then bust out of the armor and defeat Cull Obsidian. The scene was actually shot, but the filmmakers ultimately removed it because Banner successfully resolving his conflict with the Hulk felt too triumphant for a third act where half the team died, which makes sense for Infinity War.

The problem is that Marvel then skipped the resolution entirely. When Endgame begins five years later, Banner simply explains that he spent 18 months in a gamma lab and combined Bruce's brain with Hulk's body. One of the longest running conflicts in the character's entire MCU story is resolved off screen, and the uncontrollable monster from The Avengers is now Smart Hulk, taking selfies with children, wearing sweaters, and speaking exactly like Bruce Banner.

Despite Infinity War beginning with Thanos humiliating Hulk, Hulk never gets his revenge. He never fights Thanos again, and he barely even participates in the final battle of Endgame. The writers later explained that once Banner became Smart Hulk, they no longer felt a rematch made sense, because he had evolved beyond wanting another crack at Thanos. But after using Hulk's defeat to establish just how dangerous Thanos was, a lot of audience members understandably expected some kind of payoff that never came. Then, in She-Hulk, Marvel pushed the character further away from what audiences had originally responded to in The Avengers. Bruce is basically a laid back mentor living in Mexico, teaching Jennifer how to control her powers, while the show leans heavily into broad comedy, including the infamous twerking scene, moving Hulk even further away from the dangerous, unpredictable rage monster audiences had originally fallen in love with.

Spider-Man: Brand New Day brings back the rage monster, but in someone else's movie

In Spider-Man: Brand New Day, Marvel finally brought back the version of Hulk audiences had been missing, and really, that's what Hulk always should have been. Bruce can learn to communicate with him, and Hulk can become more heroic over time, but the character stops being interesting when the conflict between the two disappears entirely. There should always be some danger that when Bruce loses control, something incredibly powerful and unpredictable is going to come out.

That doesn't mean Hulk has to be a mindless monster. The Avengers proved you can give him personality, humor, and humanity while still making him absolutely terrifying when he gets angry.

Brand New Day also highlights another problem Marvel still hasn't solved. Hulk's big return as a rage monster doesn't happen in a Hulk movie. It happens in a Spider-Man movie. That's basically been the character's entire existence since 2008. He was one of the Avengers, became a supporting character in Thor: Ragnarok, appeared in She-Hulk, and now shows up in Spider-Man. Marvel clearly knows how to use Hulk as a weapon inside someone else's story, but they still haven't proved that they know how to use him in his own.

Which version of Bruce Banner and the Hulk do you think came closest to getting the character right?