Hulk
Robert Bruce Banner
Movie · Phase 1
The Incredible Hulk
2008 · 112 min
Hiding in a Rio favela under the name David B., Bruce Banner works a bottling-plant job, practises breathing exercises and trades emails with a mysterious 'Mr. Blue' who thinks he can cure gamma…
The Infinity SagaDisney+67%Released
The story
Hiding in a Rio favela under the name David B., Bruce Banner works a bottling-plant job, practises breathing exercises and trades emails with a mysterious 'Mr. Blue' who thinks he can cure gamma poisoning. A blood-contaminated soda bottle leads General Ross straight to him.
The chase runs from Brazil to Guatemala to a college campus in Virginia, with Ross's pet soldier Emil Blonsky escalating from super-soldier serum to a gamma transfusion and finally into the Abomination. The film ends not with a cure but with Banner learning to open the door on purpose.
Key facts
- Release date
- 13 Jun 2008
- Status
- Released
- Phase
- Phase 1
- Saga
- The Infinity Saga
- Runtime
- 112 min
- Certificate
- PG-13
- Director
- Louis Leterrier
- Writers
- Zak Penn
- Streaming
- Disney+
- Timeline placement
- 2011 — roughly a year after Iron Man, running concurrently with Iron Man 2 and Thor
Cast
| Actor | Role |
|---|---|
| Edward Norton | Bruce Banner / Hulk |
| Liv Tyler | Betty Ross |
| Tim Roth | Emil Blonsky / Abomination |
| William Hurt | General Thaddeus 'Thunderbolt' Ross |
| Tim Blake Nelson | Samuel Sterns |
Characters
Easter eggs
- Tony Stark walks into the bar in the final scene to tell Ross 'we're putting a team together' — the second MCU stinger and the first hero-to-hero crossover.
- Stan Lee's cameo is the elderly Milwaukee man who drinks the guaraná soda contaminated with Banner's blood, triggering the manhunt.
- Lou Ferrigno, the Hulk of the 1978 CBS series, cameos as a campus security guard and provides the Hulk's vocal roars.
- Bruce channel-surfs past Bill Bixby in The Courtship of Eddie's Father — Bixby played Banner in the same TV series.
- Craig Armstrong's score quotes Joe Harnell's 'The Lonely Man' piano theme from the 1970s show whenever Banner is on the run.
- Ross explicitly ties the gamma work back to a WWII-era 'infantry sub-project', the first on-screen nod to the Super-Soldier programme that made Captain America.
- Samuel Sterns' forehead swelling in the lab finale is the beginning of the Leader — a thread left dangling for seventeen years until Captain America: Brave New World.
- A deleted opening has Banner attempting suicide in the Arctic, the sequence that would have revealed Captain America frozen in ice.
Trivia
- Edward Norton did substantial uncredited rewrites, then clashed with Marvel over the final cut and declined promotional duties; he was replaced by Mark Ruffalo for The Avengers.
- The film is a soft reboot rather than a sequel to Ang Lee's 2003 Hulk, compressing the origin into the opening credits.
- Universal retains distribution rights to solo Hulk films, which is why Marvel has never made a second one.
- Tim Roth trained for months and studied predatory animals; the Abomination's spine and jaw went through dozens of design passes before landing on the comic silhouette.
- Roughly 70 minutes of footage was cut, including a full subplot about Banner's mother that Norton had championed.
- Louis Leterrier lobbied to shoot in Rio's Rocinha favela for the rooftop chase, using real residents as extras.
Box office
- Budget
- $150 million
- Worldwide
- $265.6 million
- Domestic
- $134.8 million
Reviews
Critics
67%
It's not the most original superhero movie, but The Incredible Hulk is fast-paced and briskly entertaining, with a fine performance from Edward Norton.
The MarvelGossips verdict
The MCU's orphan — a lean, mean chase movie with a genuinely tragic Banner that the franchise then spent fifteen years quietly writing around. Norton is better than the film he's in, and the Abomination brawl still hits harder than most modern Marvel finales. It is also the only MCU film that feels like it belongs to a different studio, because commercially it does.
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Frequently asked
Is The Incredible Hulk MCU canon?
Yes. Marvel has consistently treated it as canon, and its characters have returned: Ross became a recurring figure through Captain America: Brave New World, Blonsky reappeared in She-Hulk, and Samuel Sterns finally became the Leader in 2025.
Why has there never been a Hulk 2?
Universal holds distribution rights to standalone Hulk films from its earlier deal with Marvel. Marvel can use the character freely in ensemble films but would have to partner with Universal for a solo release, which has never happened.
Is Edward Norton's Banner the same as Mark Ruffalo's?
In-universe, yes — it is the same Bruce Banner, simply recast from The Avengers onward. Norton left after creative disagreements with Marvel Studios over the edit.
Who is Mr. Blue in The Incredible Hulk?
Mr. Blue is Samuel Sterns, the cellular biologist Banner corresponds with online. Exposure to Banner's blood begins mutating him into the Leader, the Hulk's classic super-intelligent nemesis.