10 Marvel Heroes You Won't Believe Defeated Hulk

9. Hawkeye

Hawkeye Civil War 2
Marvel Comics

This victory may come with a huge asterisk, but there's still no overlooking the fact that Clint Barton, the Avenger most fans (mistakenly) love to hate, has not only defeated the Hulk, but straight up murdered him too.

Under any other scenario you would be right to assume that the Hulk would pick Hawkeye up, laugh at his pointy helmet-mask-thing and his brief music career for JEEP motors (okay, that may ACTUALLY be Jeremy Renner), before yeeting him into the stratosphere to an assumed demise. However, this was Civil War country baby! And as most fans will know, Marvel tends to lose any sense of self-control during these events.

Designed in part to cash-in on the hype surrounding the Captain America: Civil War film, Marvel sanctioned a follow-up that pitted Iron Man against Captain Marvel, with the two allies split on the issue of whether or not to use a new Inhuman's ability to see the future, as a means to preemptively deal with major threats.

One such threat involved the Hulk going berserk and, in not so Hulk-ish fashion, murdering all the Avengers.

And thus Bruce Banner hatches a plan. If Hawkeye ever thinks he's about to fulfil that vision, he's there to kill the good doctor before he can Hulk out. And low and behold, when the Avengers go to confront Banner, Clint fires one arrow and kills Bruce then and there.

Advertisement
Content Producer/Presenter

WhatCulture's very own resident movie guy, Ewan has been working in the content creation biz for over 10 years now, having started as a freelance contributor to WhatCulture Gaming all the way back in 2015. After graduating with a First-Class Honours in History from Northumbria University in 2017 (where he won a prize for a totally killer dissertation on the Watergate years), Ewan took on the role of Comics Editor at WhatCulture and quickly developed WhatCulture Comics into one of the biggest superhero-focused channels on YouTube. He followed this with a brief hiatus at Screen Rant in 2021, where he worked across the Gaming and Film sections as a writer and editor, before returning to WhatCulture as a Senior Content Producer / Presenter in 2023. He started his own podcast, We Love Dad Movies, in 2022, and has contributed several written pieces to the Eisner-nominated comics website Shelfdust as well. In his current role, Ewan incorporates his love of cinema, comic books, and history into written pieces and video essays for WhatCulture's Film & TV channel, as well as WhatCulture Gaming and WhatCulture Horror, with a particular focus on nineties-era Dad Movies, old school Westerns, and Golden Age Hollywood Noir. John Carpenter is his fave, and he thinks Batman Beyond should never have been cancelled. If that's your vibe, you'll probably like his stuff.