Edward Norton fought with Marvel to make a "serious" Hulk movie, which is probably why they fired him
The Incredible Hulk director Louis Leterrier has opened up about tensions between Norton and Marvel on the 2008 film
Many lessons have been extracted from the success of Marvel’s original Iron Man over the last 15 years: Jon Favreau’s unlikely (at the time) box office winner took a B-tier comic book hero and made him the biggest name on the planet, largely by going low-key on the comic book lore, and heavy on the charisma, creating a perfect vehicle for Robert Downey Jr.’s resurgent star power.
Its immediate follow-up, The Incredible Hulk, did… not do that. It did teach some other lessons, though: Notably that Marvel will absolutely shitcan you without remorse if it feels like it, with the company releasing a famously testy press release in the movie’s aftermath back in 2010, announcing that star Edward Norton would not be reprising the role of Bruce Banner, because the company was looking for an actor “who embodies the creativity and collaborative spirit of our other talented cast members.”
More than a decade later, director Louis Leterrier—who, like Norton, has never returned to the Marvel fold, despite helming high-profile films like Fast X—is opening up about the conflicts between Norton and the studio, with much of the conversation focused on attempts to inject humor into the franchise’s DNA. Appearing on Josh Horowitz’s Happy Sad Confused podcast this week, Leterrier revealed that things were actually super-smooth on the movie for most of the filming, saying “The whole way, everybody was in lock step.” But, “It just got tense at the end. The end, it was very tense about the tone and the level of humor. Although Edward is very funny, all his friends are comedians and he is an extremely funny guy, he was very right in defending the seriousness of the movie.”
Interestingly, Leterrier points to the other genre-defining superhero movie of 2008 as a key breaking point here, citing Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight as the direction Norton was pushing the movie toward. Critically, that film didn’t come out until a month after Hulk, which means nobody making the Marvel movie presumably had its billion-dollar box office template to point to when resisting the push for more comedy in their movie about the big green anger monster, resistance that presumably got fractious enough that Marvel decided to go looking for a Mark Ruffalo-type who “embodies the collaborative spirit” instead of putting Norton in The Avengers. (Of course, it probably doesn’t help that whatever compromises were inflicted on Hulk didn’t do it any favors at the box office, either; the movie brought in just $264 million in theaters, meaning it fell well below either Iron Man or The Dark Knight.)