When the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) officially replaced Edward Norton with Mark Ruffalo as Bruce Banner for the first Avengers film, there was speculation about what that might mean for a new movie featuring the Hulk.
There’s still speculation, because a new movie featuring the big green guy hasn’t materialized since then. Ruffalo’s remained optimistic about the possibility, but recent comments from him don’t look good.
A Yahoo Movies interview about the Golden Globe nomination for his role in Infinitely Polar Bear pivots in the middle to mostly be about Ruffalo’s time in the MCU and more specifically, the prospect of a Hulk movie in the future. Basically, Universal still has skin in the game from being involved in the first two films despite the fact that Disney now owns Marvel. The question posed boiled down to this: since Sony and Marvel worked things out to get Spider-Man in MCU films, would Universal and Marvel manage to do the same?
“I think they’ve been working on it,” Yahoo Movies quotes Ruffalo as saying. “Marvel and Universal famously don’t get along very well, and so that’s working against us, definitely. But I know for a fact that everyone is holding out hope that one day we can do it. But the nature of the relationship right now, it’s a little prohibitive. And I hope that that changes, that changes with regimes, it changes over the course of time. But right now it doesn’t look particularly promising.”
With the Sony and Marvel deal, the two media organizations appear to have come to a compromise that helps both out. Sony gets to be involved with the MCU in a limited way, and Marvel gets to use Spider-Man again like it’s wanted to for years. It’s unclear exactly what Universal might get out of the deal in the same way if they’re still holding out. One assumes that a similar kind of deal must have been on the table at some point, but who knows? All that’s for sure is that there is still no Mark Ruffalo-starring Hulk movie, and the world is less for it.
