10 MCU Storylines We’ll Never Get Closure On
2. The Aborted End Of The Hulk’s Arc
From Age Of Ultron through Ragnarok and Infinity War, the stage seemed to be set for a psychological examination of Bruce Banner’s fractured psyche, adapting some of the best Hulk comics of the last twenty-five years.
It was steady, consistent character development based on sound psychology… and then Endgame gave us the biggest missed opportunity of the franchise to date, presenting us with a ‘merged’ Hulk after the time jump. All the interesting stuff we’d see up until now was jettisoned, in favour of some offhand explanation involving an offscreen “eighteen months in a gamma lab.”
Not only that, but there’s no whisper of the Hulk’s actual persona in this new Smart Hulk. Banner claims he started seeing the Hulk as the cure, but it’s clear that all he’s done is science the sh*t out of the problem. It would be lovely if we could look at this as a mistake on Banner’s part, a continuation of the storyline… but it seems unlikely we’ll see Hulk on screen any time soon.
Marvel Studios won’t make a Hulk movie - they claim it’s because Universal has first refusal on distribution, but it’s really because they don’t see Hulk as a lead. Neither of his last two movies have made significant money, and they think he works better (and cheaper) as a feature attraction.
Right now the odds are that Mark Ruffalo’s last contracted appearance in the MCU will be in the She Hulk Disney+ series in a couple of years.