The MCU's Hulk never got an origin story, unlike most other superheroes in Marvel's mega-franchise. The Jade Giant is the most uncharacteristic of the MCU's central characters, not only in terms of his powers or his moral grey areas but because he doesn't fit into the franchise's narrative structure. He has no real origin story and fans are expected to accept both that he had a pre-MCU life and that it doesn't matter. Even Peter Parker, Marvel's expensive hero-for-hire investment from Sony, was given the narrative space for a backstory (albeit one that came after his introduction). Hulk got nothing but a cursory nod back to his Universal-exclusive days and a hand-wave.

First introduced to modern movies (the character had a TV-movie past too) with Ang Lee's bold but not-entirely-successful Hulk in 2003, it took the Incredible Hulk (and Bruce Banner) until Mark Ruffalo's transformative appearance in The Avengers almost a decade later for a truly exciting character to even be considered a viable cinematic option. That came, in no small part, thanks to the accidental abuses of Lee's origin story and Louis Leterrier's misguided follow-up, The Incredible Hulk. With Ruffalo's Hulk enjoying an excellent three-movie arc into Avengers: Endgame, call for a solo movie has never dampened, but what fans will likely never get is a true MCU origin for the character.

Related: The MCU Didn't Have A Good Plan At First - And Incredible Hulk Proves It

Despite the fact that The Incredible Hulk does count as an MCU film - even if it's reductively counted as the "black sheep" of the family" - Ed Norton's version of Bruce Banner was curiously lumbered with the ghosts of his past that meant he couldn't have an origin for his part in a new extended universe. All he got, in that respect, was an (admittedly good) montage recap of how his mutation occurred during the opening credits. So why did that happen?

The Incredible Hulk

The answer, unfortunately for Hulk fans, is tired into the same reason a solo Hulk movie was deemed impossible for so long: that old issue of rights. Back before the MCU was a thing, Marvel faced their financial issues by selling character rights and Universal picked up the rights to make Hulk solo movies. They made Ang Lee's strange Hulk in 2003 and then when they missed the deadline to make the planned sequel (focusing on Grey Hulk and The Leader), Marvel Studios partially reacquired the rights and financed The Incredible Hulk, with Kevin Feige helping to guide the direction. What they made, despite Leterrier being told it was not a sequel, was, in the words of producer Gale Anne Hurd a requel (part reboot, part sequel, like James Gunn's The Suicide Squad) and the mixed message and Marvel's impatience robbed fans of the origin.

After Ang Lee's ponderous pace in Hulk, Marvel wanted to have Hulk appear sooner, which meant dropping any establishing work, which Feige said was unnecessary because audiences were so familiar with it. Ironically, that probably now isn't true. With Universal keen to still make a sequel, which Leterrier initially thought he was, and the strange decision to tie the two films together by ending Hulk in South America and starting The Incredible Hulk there, it was inevitable that audiences would believe the link existed. By refusing to add a true origin outside of the opening credits in order to avoid repetition, Marvel essentially all-but-canonized Hulk's origin story. The studio broke the first rule of rebooting - that the content actually needs to be rebooted - and Hulk fans were robbed of the origin that would have offered even more substance to Mark Ruffalo's version of the character and his arc of conflict that ran throughout the Avengers movies and Thor Ragnarok.

Next: Avengers: Where Hulk Was During Iron Man's Endgame Death

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