Avengers Hulk Theory: Does Bruce Banner Die THREE Times In The MCU?!
The Deaths Of Bruce Banner
The key sequence to remember here is the tragic moment in The Avengers when Bruce tells Nick Fury that his plan to contain the Hulk using the cell Loki is imprisoned in would be completely pointless because attempting to kill him is fruitless. As he says himself:
"In case you needed to kill me, but you can't! I know! I tried!... I got low. I didn't see an end, so I put a bullet in my mouth... and the other guy spit it out! So I moved on. I focused on helping other people."
The inference there isn't that Banner was going to kill himself, but the Hulk intervened to stop it from happening. He literally says that he "put a bullet in his mouth". He went through with his attempt at suicide and despite not being in control of the wheel, as Banner later refers to it, Hulk still managed to resist the fatality of the shot. It wasn't just anger that provoked him to change, it was a post-mortem instinct to stay alive.
In effect, Hulk brought Banner back to life, reversing what should have been a mortal wound. And that wasn't the only time it happened either. That was just the first time Banner died.
The second came in the sequel to that very movie. As Banner struggled with control of his inner demon after Scarlet Witch showed him the destructive power that turning the Hulk against his allies could mean and refused to change into the Hulk, Black Widow did the only thing she could think of. She pushed him into the drilling pit under Sokovia that Ultron is using to turn the city into a meteor in order to force a transformation.
If the result of that had been that Banner had been overtaken by rage (hence the transformation), the Hulk would have arrived as he does in the first Avengers, as a quivvering, barely in-control ball of muscular rage. That reaction is very much an instinctive mirror of Banner's emotions, rather than a choice by the Hulk, in contrast to when Banner transforms wilfully for the Battle Of New York. Hulk doesn't arrive in berserker mode there, because Banner is calm.
So to take that point into the Ultron moment, Banner is pushed off the edge and Hulk jumps back out of the hole and smirks at Widow. No anger, no punishment... a smirk. That's because the thing that transforms Banner into Hulk this time is the same thing that did when he tried to kill himself: it was Hulk's invulnerability. Banner hit the floor and should have died, but Hulk revived him once more.
And it happened again in Hulk's next appearance in the MCU, too. After disappearing at the end of Age Of Ultron to live in Fiji peacefully, Hulk ended up lost in outer space (nobody ask too many questions, Joss Whedon dropped the ball, okay?) and on a planet called Sakaar where he was reunited with Thor and ended up heping overthrow an entire government in Thor: Ragnarok.
That film's deathly moment comes in the final act when Thor and the Asgardians are facing almost inevitable destruction at the hands of Hela's forces and Fenris Wolf. Acting the hero, Banner turns to Valkyrie as they watch above the action and delivers what amounts to a hero speech before leaping to save the day. In one of the funniest moments in the MCU's entire run, he doesn't transform as intended and instead hits the bifrost bridge with a sickening thud that would DEFINITELY have been fatal to Banner.
He's no more than a normal man: no augmentations, no superpowers in himself, no invulnerability. He's dead for all intents and purposes. But then Hulk revives him once again to make the save and kill Hela's giant pet dog. That's the third time he's transformed through death and the third time Bruce Banner should be added to the MCU's In Memoriam section.
And yet he lives on.
You have to consider, at this point, whether he can even be killed in any conventional sort of way. The creature undoubtedly feels pain - as Thanos proved - and he has his vulnerabilities, but everything we've seen so far suggests that he is virtually immortal. Even the steel trap designed to crush him if needed in The Avengers was probably going to cause no more than a bit of a headache or a transformation back into Bruce Banner.
In the comics, the Hulk has been killed before - famously in Old Man Logan, Wolverine shreds him from the inside after letting himself be eaten and Hulk's death during the Onslaught event was a key point. There have been other times too, but this being comic books, he's always come back in some form and has gone on to be considered the Immortal Hulk in a new guise that kicked off in 2018.
Maybe Marvel are trying to tell us something with that title?
Interestingly, the 2018 Immortal Hulk comic seemingly has similar ideas about Hulk's mortality. Kicking off with Bruce Banner's murder, it introduces a new idea to the Hulk mythology, reimagining his transformation as a sort of post-mortem zombification that traps Banner in a Groundhog Day-style loop.
In this story, no matter how many times Banner is killed, the Hulk resurrects him, because as another character confirms, though Banner himself has died and CAN die, the Hulk cannot. Even after Banner's body dies, Hulk's identity rages on inside him and is powerful enough to resurrect his "host." It fits in with the way the MCU's Banner talks, as if Hulk is possessing him, rather than simply sharing his body. Like he's an infection, just as he would be if he was a zombie.
Even more interestingly, the second issue of Immortal Hulk also suggests something that could work in the MCU too. Banner realises that every time he is resurrected, he loses some of his intelligence and Hulk gets more intelligent. Could this also account for the changes we've seen in the MCU's Hulk and Banner? Does he too lose intelligence every time he dies? Could that be why he fatally helps Tony Stark create Ultron despite the obvious issues of playing God?
Could that be why Hulk is able to take control of him for so long for the events leading up to Thor: Ragnarok? And how Hulk can defy Banner's attempts to "call him into action" in Infinity War? Are we seeing the MCU and the Immortal Hulk comics drawn closely together?
So where do they go from here? How can they deal with a character who cannot die if the actor playing him might not want to continue playing him?