I was a little trepidatious revisiting The Incredible Hulk (2008) for one reason: Edward Norton.
Don’t get me wrong. Norton is a great actor. I thought he was fantastic in Glass Onion a couple years ago, and he was thoroughly excellent in the under-rated gem The Illusionist where he plays a stage magician with a mysterious past.
But he suffers from one fatal flaw - he’s not Mark Ruffalo. Ruffalo slid into the Bruce Banner role so perfectly in The Avengers (2012) that watching Ed Norton here - or Eric Bana in Ang Lee’s comic-panel fever dream from 2003 - just feels off now. Like watching Temu Hulk. Or Hulk from Wish.
Mark Ruffalo in Now You See Me 2 where he plays a stage magician with a mysterious past. (Source: IMDb)
Ruffalo vs. Norton aside, The Incredible Hulk is a strange film all around. Released just five years after Lee's Hulk, it feels more like a reshoot than a reboot. It hits so many of the same story beats, but with half the panache. The decision doesn’t make a ton of sense on paper and it doesn’t make much more sense in practice either. I can only assume that a lot of that had to do with the success of Batman Begins a couple years earlier, but that was eight years after a four movie series with a radically different tonal shift and widely publicized no-nipples agenda.
This was just more of the same, but less of the good stuff. And for a big tentpole action movie, it's surprisingly light on action -- we have the favela chase at the beginning where we only get flashes of the Hulk, the fight in the middle with the speaker trucks, and the fight at the end against the body-horror nightmare that Tim Roth becomes. That said, those speaker trucks are super cool - and I can never get enough of watching pre-Abomination Roth (aka Mr. Orange from Reservoir Dogs) go flying into that tree.
Source: The Incredible Hulk (2008)
In terms of future universe-building, William Hurt is introduced here as General "Thunderbolt" Ross, a role he maintains throughout most of the movies until his real life passing. We also meet estranged daughter and romantic interest Betsy Ross, played by Liv Tyler who disappears completely from the MCU until this year's Brave New World, sometime after she gets kidnapped by Hulk and taken to his King Kong Cave on Green Screen Island.
And then there's the whirlwind meeting with Mr. Blue/Dr. Samuel Sterns, who also returns in BNW. Tim Blake Nelson's Leader-teasing character is a prime example of the kind of hubris that runs through The Incredible Hulk and, more broadly, through the Marvel Cinematic Universe itself. Sterns is so convinced that the blood from Bruce Banner’s transformation will be the key to saving the world. The hubris of his belief that he’s saving humanity is underscored by his complete disregard for the catastrophic consequences of his actions.
Source: The Incredible Hulk (2008)
There’s a certain dark mirror here in the MCU’s overarching theme: the dangerous pursuit of unchecked power, whether in the form of an Infinity Stone or a super soldier serum. Characters like Tony Stark and Nick Fury, for all their genius, suffer from this same fatal flaw - the belief that they can control something they don’t fully understand. In Iron Man, Stark initially builds weapons to save the world, only to realize that the very power he created has been twisted into tools of destruction. It’s a lesson about the dangers of thinking you can control the uncontrollable - a theme that would become central in later MCU films. Sterns is the embodiment of this idea taken to its extreme: what starts as a noble pursuit for a cure morphs into a reckless desire to push the limits as far as they can go.
Except for Sterns, this transformation happens in under ten minutes over the course of one scene, instead of over ten years.
Source: The Incredible Hulk (2008)
Behind the scenes, the decision to make The Incredible Hulk is even more baffling when you stack it up against Iron Man, which came out just six weeks earlier. Despite feeling smaller and more contained, Hulk actually had the bigger budget - $150 million compared to Iron Man’s $140 million. It also paid Norton significantly more than Marvel shelled out for Robert Downey Jr. at the time. Downey was still clawing his way back into Hollywood’s good graces and only got about $500K up front, while Norton was the A-Lister and pulled in a cool $4–5 million. Of course, Downey ended up with the last laugh - thanks to backend points and Marvel’s eventual Downey-dependence, he turned that half-million into hundreds of millions. Norton just got recast.
And the box office returns are pretty consistent with what you'd expect from a reboot no one asked for. Iron Man soared to $585 million worldwide and immediately cemented itself as the MCU’s flagship. The Incredible Hulk made less than half that - about $264 million - and was pretty quickly forgotten. Marvel Studios overlord Kevin Feige produced both films, but Iron Man was his real baby, the start of everything.
In the end, The Incredible Hulk isn’t a bad movie. It’s just a weird one. Caught between the arthouse ambitions of 2003 and the shared universe clarity of what was coming, it never fully transforms. Not into a monster, not into a blockbuster, and not into something Marvel would really build on - at least not until Ruffalo showed up to pick up the pieces.
Source: The Incredible Hulk (2008)
Potent Quotables
"As far as I'm concerned, that man's whole body is property of the U.S. army."
"I've always been more curious than cautious, and that's served me pretty well."
"Don't make me... hungry. You wouldn't like me when I'm... hungry."
"Why are you always hitting people?"
My Personal Ranking
As I go through all the movies over the next several weeks, I'll keep a running tally of where they fit in my personal spectrum of best and worst of all the MCU offerings. This one is still pretty easy to sort, but it's going to get hard really quickly I think.
| Rank | Movie | Year |
|---|---|---|
| #1 | Iron Man | 2008 |
| #2 | The Incredible Hulk | 2008 |
Next up: Iron Man 2 — the movie where Tony Stark wrestles with legacy, daddy issues, and a guy who builds electric whips in his garage. It’s louder, messier, more MCU-ish - and also the moment we realize this whole shared universe thing might actually work.