Louis Leterrier is Up For More Hulk
HULK SMASH!!! Or will he? Well if The Incredible Hulk director Louis Leterrier gets his way, the big green bugger will indeed once again rage out on screen in a follow-up to his 2008 adaption of the popular comic. Leterrier recently confirmed his interest to Moviehole by saying, “Sure, I’d return to it. I have some ideas. So many ideas for so many things.”
However what Leterrier wants or doesn’t want probably has no impact on the suits over at Marvel, who weren’t too impressed with the movie’s domestic gross of 134 million dollars (on a 130 million budget), causing them to hesitate about greenlighting a sequel, even though the movie in reality was a pretty decent success overall, taking into the account the international gross of 128 million.
Another negative is also the fact that Edward Norton, who played Bruce Banner/The Hulk in the movie, so far hasn’t seemed too keen on returning due to his troubles with Marvel regarding his lack of creative control on the first film. But hey, let’s not dwell on all the things a possible sequel has going against it, and instead try and look at what might actually lead to its creation.
1. The Hulk will appear in The Avengers. This definitely is a big thing going for the green guy, as it means Marvel hasn’t completely given up on him yet. However it is yet to be known if it will just be the big CG monster appearing, or also his alter ego Bruce Banner.
2. The Abomination aka actor Tim Roth will appear in a minimum of 3 future Marvel movies. The Abomination was the main villain in The Incredible Hulk, and really doesn’t have all that much to do with the rest of the Marvel universe in general, so why plan to have a Hulk enemy around, if not to either have The Hulk himself in there too, or as a minimum build up for his return?
3. Leterrier is under contract with Marvel to direct another movie for the studio, which could potentially mean a second Hulk film, though the director has also expressed interest in doing an Avengers quadrilogy, or if he can’t have four films, then at least just the current one planned. Then again, a lot of directors want to have a crack at The Avengers, so Leterrier is probably as close to that as he is to a second round with Hulk.
4. Marvel has already rebooted the character once within the last couple of years, so they can’t really do that again, and the property is too much of a potential cash grab for them to do nothing with it. So if Hulk’s turn in The Avengers is a success, it actually wouldn’t be all that surprising to me to see a second film greenlit. But that means that the next movie won’t actually start production until 2012 at the earliest, which probably puts Leterrier out of the picture as director, and likely Norton as the star too.
Comments (4)
I find the Hulk to be weak as a stand-alone lead in his own movies. That probably explains why the Hulk movies have not done as well. He seems to have a pretty simple character arc and there just doesn’t seem to be a whole lot that you can do with him. Using him as a auxiliary character or as the villain in the Avenger makes sense. He’s kind of like Godzilla in a sense, another big green irradiated monster. He can be a good guy or a bad guy and that kind of dilutes his power one way or the other. I guess he’s more misunderstood as opposed to being outright evil or good, and that just makes it harder to make his stories have a lot of impact, I feel.
Posted by Maopheus on August 31st, 2009I really liked that movie, but I think part of the problem is it came out after a pretty unpopular Hulk film had soured many people’s Hulk apatite and in a summer chock full of Super Hero flicks.
Posted by Paul on August 31st, 2009Abomination in three films? Sure looked like Hulk killed him in the last one – although in comic book land that doesn’t mean a whole lot.
Morpheus is right – they need to treat the Hulk like they do in the Ultimates (comic) where he is pretty much an unstopable force of pure destruction, he is let loose only as a last resort and pointed in the general direction of bad guys – then often he has to beaten into submission by the good guys after he eats the bad guys.
That’s who the Hulk is. Not the poor, green, sensitive soul who just wants to be left alone so he can pet kittens and draw unicorns that the movies have tried to turn him into.
Posted by Shut-Up Ed on August 31st, 2009Blech. The Leterrier Hulk movie was probably the cheesiest, most predictable, most formulaic, and least interesting Marvel-based character movie that I’ve seen in the last 10 years. I even liked it less than Daredevil, and I really hated Daredevil. To be fair I have yet to see Ghost Rider or Elekrta.
Posted by Matt on September 1st, 2009At least Ang Lee gave us something new and interesting.
An Avengers movie would work better if the Hulk is kept to a minimum or omitted entirely, imo.
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