Earlier this year while doing the rounds for Avengers: Age Of Ultron, Mark Ruffalo revealed that part of the reason for the lack of a Hulk solo movie was the rights, which are partly held by Universal. Those of us hoping that the situation had changed should be prepared for bad news.
“Actually, it feels even further away,” Ruffalo told USA TODAY while promoting Tom McCarthy’s Spotlight. “It’s not Marvel’s property, it’s Universal’s property. I don’t know. It seems really problematic.”
“I’ve been around long enough to be OK with it. There’s only so much that’s in my power and I’m not going to agonize over what is not in my power. I definitely try to limit that to my kids and the things that really matter to me.”
He is, however, definitely looking forward to teaming up with Chris Hemsworth in Thor: The Dark World.
“I don’t know what the story is yet, but it’ll be [Loki] and Thor, and then I’ll be in there here and there. But I don’t know any of the particulars quite yet. I’ve talked to Taika [Waititi, director] a little bit and I like where it’s headed. … Chris [Hemsworth] and I have a really good time together, we goof off and play around when Tom Hiddleston is around. So it’ll be a lot of funny back-and-forth, especially with Taika, he does that really well. It’ll have that kind of antagonistic Odd Couple-thing going on.”
He also spoke about what he’d like to do with the character, including having Bruce Banner confront his rage-filled alter ego.
“When you get off of the planet Earth, you can start playing with that stuff a little bit,” he teased. “I’m angling for it. I don’t know if it’ll happen now, but at some point, I’d like to see it happen. When I was doing Age of Ultron — doing the Scarlet Witch acid trip scenes — it really took me a long time to figure out what the Hulk would be afraid of. And then I realized, it was Banner. That relationship is what we’re all so into, but we’ve never seen them in the same scene together — you’re either one or the other, or somewhere in between. But I always imagined that that could be pretty exciting if we could pull it off. In the Marvel Universe, there is some precedence for it. I remember as a kid, seeing a few of the comics that’d have this multidimensional thing, so there’s a lot of ways to do it … if we could find the right context to use it.”
Thor: Ragnarok will be released in cinemas on 27 October 2017. Check out the comics that inspired the film in the 100 All-Time Greatest Comics bookazine now.
