The Marvel Cinematic Universe loves to throw curve-ball crossovers at the audience with each new project, and you can guarantee that nobody would have predicted we’d be seeing Doctor Strange‘s Wong battling against The Incredible Hulk‘s Abomination in an underground cage fight as part of Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings.
Even though Tim Roth had already been confirmed for his MCU return in She-Hulk before the first trailer dropped, fans still went wild for his surprise guest spot in Shang-Chi. Roth even returned to voice the monstrous version of Emil Blonsky in the movie, even if it hardly required a Shakespearean monologue.
We’ll avoid spoilers, but there’s some interesting backstory and consequences to the showdown between Wong and Abomination, and given what transpires during Shang-Chi‘s mid-credits scene, the interaction between the resident of the Sanctum Santorum and the gamma-radiated ex-solider creates a multitude of questions regarding what comes next for the unlikely pairing.
In a new interview, Cretton tried to skirt around specifics as much as possible, but still managed to explain how he managed to settle an Abomination and Wong as the conduits to both illuminate one of the film’s set pieces and further the overarching narrative of the MCU.
“How we arrive at ideas is so hard to trace back to where they began. Abomination was just a result of twenty-to-thirty what-ifs. Then we landed on a pairing that felt really great, but it was also a pairing that made sense to what’s happening in the MCU around the time of our movie. So there are definite links happening that you will pick up on if you’re involved with everything else that’s happening in the MCU.”
It’s all very curious, and Roth’s involvement in She-Hulk just got a whole lot more interesting now that he’s been reintroduced in Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings. Of course, that’s exactly how Kevin Feige wants us to feel, and the MCU has hooked us yet again to impatiently wait for what comes next.