Since his short time as the Incredible Hulk came to an end over a decade ago, Edward Norton hasn’t been shy in his dismissal of Marvel Studios and the gigantic green hero. When asked, even Mark Ruffalo, who’s played the MCU’s Hulk since the first Avengers film, said that the Fight Club star offered him no words of advice. But one denouncement in particular has been gaining a lot of attention recently.
It took place last year at the Comedy Central Roast of Bruce Willis. Norton took the stage to poke fun at the career of one of Hollywood’s biggest action stars, but as it turned out, he’d saved one bullet in the cartridge for Marvel.
Here’s how he put it:
“I tried to be like you. I did a big action movie called The Incredible Hulk. You know what went wrong? I wanted a better script…I thought we should make one Marvel movie as good as the worst Christopher Nolan movie, but what the hell was I thinking.”
Edward Norton throws a shade on MCU pic.twitter.com/KuCwl9OcXs
— Ruin Johnson (@RuinJohnson1) August 12, 2019
During production of the Louis Leterrier picture, Norton had actually reached an agreement with Marvel to rewrite Zak Penn’s script. But despite that fact, the studio ultimately cut out most of the scenes the star’d been advocating for. And the resulting head-to-head between Norton and the producers led to the role being recast with Mark Ruffalo. Sure, Ruffalo hasn’t had a chance to star in his own solo film, but the Hulk’s become an increasingly more important character throughout the series.
And while Norton’s insistence may’ve been his downfall with the MCU, it’s not as if Marvel’s struggled without him. As we all know, their three hour galactic epic, Avengers: Endgame, finally surpassed Avatar as the leader of the worldwide box office, and their most recent venture, Spider-Man: Far From Home, has become the web-slinger’s highest grossing film to date.