10 Big MCU Revelations That Didn’t Come From The Movies

7. Samuel Sterns Survived

The Incredible Hulk Samuel Sterns The Leader
Universal Pictures

The Incredible Hulk is the black sheep of the MCU, that part of the universe that is technically family, but one that you wouldn't invite to the Christmas get-together. In terms of the movies, it has barely any connective tissue with the rest of the franchise, but fortunately, Marvel has shown it some love in their supplementary material.

One of the biggest plot threads the film left dangling was Samuel Sterns' fate. The last time we saw him onscreen, he suffered a head wound that was infected with Bruce Banner's blood, which slowly began to enlarge his head. This hinted that he would transform into the Marvel Comics villain The Leader in a future film, but it's now 2019, and Sterns has been MIA since his sole film appearance.

So what happened to him, and where is he now?

Again, we turn to a comic-book for answers. In Fury's Big Week - which documents the title character's efforts to clean up after Phase One movies like Thor and Iron Man - we meet Sterns once again, and discover that he's gone completely insane after the events of The Incredible Hulk.

fury's big week samuel sterns
Marvel Comics

But since he's just a crazy dude with a big head, Black Widow has no trouble taking him down, and he's taken into custody by SHIELD. But since the organisation has become a full-on broken-down mess since then, there's a chance that Sterns is actually wandering around somewhere, plotting an evil scheme.

Contributor
Contributor

Danny has been with WhatCulture for over ten years, and is currently Doctor Who Editor and WhoCulture Channel Manager, overseeing all of WhatCulture's Whoniverse coverage. In 2022, he took charge of WhoCulture and has grown it into the biggest Doctor Who channel on YouTube, and one of the biggest Doctor Who communities on the web full-stop. He has been writing and video editing since his early teens, and first got a taste for content creation after making his own Doctor Who trailers, off the back of a burning obsession with the Matt Smith era of the show. Like many his age, he first got into Doctor Who with the 2005 revival, but has since gone back and fallen in love with the classic years too. If you need someone to recite every Doctor Who episode in order, or to give you a random factoid about the making of Gridlock, Danny is the person to ask!