10 Wild Ideas For The Hulk In Phase 5

By the time the credits rolled on Avengers: Endgame, five of the six OG Avengers had an arc representing some version of closure. Tragedy, victory, a fresh start: even if their stories, like Hawkeye and Thor, would be continuing, Endgame acted as a capstone to volume one.

And then there was the Hulk. One of the many selling points for Endgame had been the promise of the culmination of a storyline for Bruce Banner begun in Thor: Ragnarok and continued into Infinity War.

In the end, we didn’t see that happen. There was no resolution between Banner and his brutish alter ego. He simply emerged after the narrative’s five year time jump as a merged version of himself and the Hulk: free of anger management issues, an eight foot tall, green affability machine.

And following that epic climactic battle - during which we barely saw the Hulk do anything - that was it. The end of Bruce Banner’s vaunted voyage of discovery took place off-screen, with a single line of handwaving dialogue about eighteen months in a gamma lab.

Thing is, Mark Ruffalo’s played Banner in five movies now. As far as we know, he still has one appearance left on his Marvel contract… and as of now, there’s no indication as to when that appearance is going to be.

So let’s spitball a better coda for one of Marvel’s most compelling characters, since Marvel don’t seem interested in doing so...

When Avengers: Endgame came out and it became apparent the direction in which they were taking the Hulk, an awful lot of comic book fans wrote helpful, handy explainer articles about ‘Professor Hulk’ from Peter David’s brilliant ten year run on the Incredible Hulk twenty-odd years ago.

It’s important that you realise that these articles were hogwash. David’s storyline was the resolution of two years of storytelling, as Banner’s ‘personality clash’ worsened to the point that the Hulk was actively trying to kill him. With the aid of hypnotist the Ringmaster, psychiatrist Leonard Samson was (supposedly) able to integrate Bruce’s dissociative personalities into a single persona.

What Endgame gave us was a scientist fixing a psychological issue with science, only superficially resembling the ‘Professor Hulk’ storyline. However, that superficial resemblance does allow for the possibility of using another part of David’s storyline - the Hulk as team leader.

In the comics it was the Pantheon, a family of superhumans devoted to making the world a better place. Banner used their resources to assist in rescue and relief operations across the world. In the same way, the MCU’s ‘Smart Hulk’ could guest star in one of the upcoming Disney+ shows - The Falcon & The Winter Soldier, for example - leading a team of superpowered individuals to engage in non-violent global humanitarian efforts.

The Hulk could even lead a team of second string Avengers, or perhaps a S.H.I.E.L.D. unit devoted to relief operations at natural disasters, fires etc: saving lives without throwing a single punch.