Civil War 2: What Could [SPOILER]'s Death Mean For The MCU
Will the shock waves be felt on screen?
Because there's nothing Marvel loves more than you talking about them, they've gone and spoiled the end of their own comic event, confirming that the death at the end of Civil War 2 is none other than Bruce Banner. And he's really dead dead, having been murdered by an over-zealous Hawkeye trying to pre-emptively do the right thing. F*ck that guy.
Anyway, now that Hulk is dead, you should probably expect not to see him for a good couple of years until some grand relaunch that explains that actually this happened in a continuum shift and it was all a dream anyway, or something. So what does that mean for the big green guy's future as a screen character.
Obviously we've heard a lot over the years that Marvel are either unwilling or unable to make a Hulk stand-alone, whether over rights issues or just fear that they'll end up with another dud. There was no real reason to doubt that much had changed at this stage, beyond his bumping up the bill for Thor: Ragnarok, which will see how he performs in a smaller cast.
If you thought that was going to be a screen test for a possible solo outing, you're going to be sadly disappointed. At least initially anyway.
Marvel have a track record of soft tying their comics titles to MCU releases. Civil War 2 came with Captain America: Civil War, the Guardians Of The Galaxy were relaunched just in time for the film, and whisper it, but there are some pretty big suggestions that the company shelved Fantastic Four as a conscious tactic to blunt the movie's appeal in the cinema.
It might not be a case of story-lines crossing over, necessarily, but the publisher uses the Entertainment arm's marketing power to boost sales, just as it should be. The two feed off each other (in that there's no way an MCU movie would come out without a companion comic launch, even indirectly). So there's probably a pretty big indication there that they're going to put Hulk on the cooler as well.
Does this mean that Hulk is going to be killed off in Thor: Ragnarok? Not necessarily (though I wouldn't put it past them, personally), but it's increasingly unlikely that Kevin Feige and co will then announce a stand-alone Hulk while he's dead in the comics. It's just not how they'd do business.
Maybe we'll get a solo outing for Banner in Phase 4 to tie in with whatever form his inevitable relaunch in the comics takes, but that announcement isn't going to come for some time.