Hulk joins Thor but without his own film.
I’m going to take a wild guess and assume that you haven’t been living under a rock and thus are aware of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. We have Captain America: Civil War that is taking up most of the movie news lately, but there is another Marvel comic book sequel coming out too “Thor: Ragnarok.” This will be the third Thor film and recently it was reported to our surprise that the incredible Hulk would be co-starring in the film. Perhaps it’s the fact that there hasn’t been a solo Hulk film since 2008. Which begs the question, why? According to Mark Ruffalo in an interview with USA Today, he thinks it’s pretty far away.
“…it feels even further away. It’s not Marvel’s property, it’s Universal’s property. I don’t know. It seems really problematic…”
It’s a real shame as most assumed that Marvel had fully gotten the rights back to the character. It’s still unknown what the exact role Mark Ruffalo as Bruce Banner (Hulk) will play in the film.
It’s an odd choice. Sure in the comics they and lot’s of other heroes crossover all the time, however in film we expect the major comic book characters to stick to their own film franchises except for cameos until the big Avengers movies or “Civil War.” Perhaps this is a response to “Iron Man 3” and “Captain America: The Winter Soldier” criticisms of “why didn’t [lead character] call up one of the other Avengers for help?” The particulars of this arrangement are unknown and lead to a lot of interesting questions. We can assume Marvel and Universal have similar arrangements as Marvel and Sony with Spider-man. Marvel can use them in crossover films while the other studios own the right to use them in standalone films, however Universal has not. This is especially unusual since in “The Avengers” the Hulk gained a whole new level of respect and exposure from his appearance. This also raises the issue of how far does this extend? Have we not seen a She-Hulk film due to this rights issue?
So for now there’s no Hulk film but you can see him in “Thor: Ragnarok” which is scheduled to hit theaters on November 3rd, 2017.
This was first reported by USA Today