Mark Ruffalo has recently opened up about the variations of Hulk that have morphed and evolved throughout his decade and a half in-universe existence. The one that has become the most prominent is the integrated version that the audience has witnessed in the initial episodes of the Phase Four series, She-Hulk: Attorney At Law. But when it comes to Bruce Banner, this cannot be the final version that MCU has to offer for the foreseeable future.
The Berserker Hulk That Was Abandoned From AoU Subplot
The Avengers: Age of Ultron which came out in 2015 was a film that introduced several elements into the MCU that would become crucial in the future of the franchise. The most important among them was the Scarlet Witch-induced vision that Tony Stark had, essentially predicting the outcome of the Infinity Saga. Among other elements like the introduction of Jarvis/Vision, Wanda Maximoff, and mention of the Infinity Stones, there also was a subplot that was considered but later abandoned considering it would have made the plot too dense.
In a recent interview, the VFX designer from the film, Christopher Townsend, spoke of the Berserker Hulk arc that the crew played into during the formulation of the narrative. The idea was to make a Hulk so out of control that he would essentially look like he had gone mad.
“Berserker Hulk was this Hulk that Hulks out… with a deformed body, with a deformed face with one eye larger than another. You know, like crooked teeth, and drooling, and red eyes, and all this kind of stuff.
Then we started playing with color and we started to de-saturate him and give him sort of red around his eyes and made him look strung-out heroin addict Hulk was the idea. Sort of like where he has totally lost it and he’s gone totally crazy. And then we gradually tended towards a grayer and grayer version till effectively we got gray Hulk.”
Why Has the Berserker Hulk Not Been Explored in the MCU?
The Marvel Cinematic Universe is known for a lot of things, the best of which is its ability to control the narrative and deliver it in the most effective way possible. The world-building of Kevin Feige and his conception of ideas that extends decades into the future is something truly worthy of being called visionary. As such, the abandonment of the Berserker Hulk plotline may have been done with reason. Age of Ultron was perhaps too early to explore a fully rabid Hulk. Townsend claims,
“We tried a few shots in the film with that sort of much grayer version. And then we’re thinking, “Will people confuse this with the gray Hulk from the comics? And is that a good thing or a bad thing?” Eventually, I think we backed off a little bit of that and made him greener so that…we didn’t want to confuse people in creating a new character, per se, in that way. So we ultimately backed off. But we had gone pretty extreme in the looks for him.”
However, now with the vast array of possibilities of what has been happening in the Marvel universe and the reconciliation of Hulk with Banner, it’s only a matter of time before the Hulk actually finds a way out of becoming the Smart Hulk which effectively keeps Banner’s alter ego in check. If that happens, the audience may get an enraged and out-of-control Hulk that could possibly be explored in the MCU as the Berserker Hulk.
She-Hulk: Attorney At Law is currently streaming on Disney+
Source: ScreenRant
