The marvel cinematic universe It started in 2008 with ‘Iron Man’. Everyone remembers the adventure starring Robert Downey Jr., but ‘The Incredible Hulk’, the second installment of the franchise, is much more forgotten. This may be due to several reasons, both the fact that did not do well at the box office like because it was the only movie in which Edward Norton brought Bruce Banner to life.
Too intrusive, a question of money or a bit of everything?
In fact, Norton’s exit was not exactly friendly. At first it was announced through a press release Kevin Feig which highlighted that there was no economic motivation, but in “the need for an actor who embodies creativity and collaborative spirit“from the rest of the team.
Come on, Norton wanted to get too involved in decision-making, because in ‘The Incredible Hulk’ he rewrote the original script because, according to himself, “I thought we should try to make a Marvel movie that was as good as Christopher Nolan’s worst.” In the study they probably feared that the same thing would happen with ‘The Avengers’, but the truth is that it may have taken them longer than necessary to make the decision.
Shortly after Feige’s controversial statement, Brian SwardstromNorton’s agent at the time, described Feige’s attitude as unprofessional, also commenting on the following
Kevin Feige’s offensive statement is a deliberately misleading and inappropriate attempt to portray our client in a negative light. Contrary to what Kevin implied, Edward was looking forward to working with Joss Whedon and the other cast of ‘The Avengers’, since he is also a personal friend of many of them.
Swardstrom also highlighted that Norton had already maintained “non-confrontational talks“and that the monetary issue had indeed influenced that decision. Taking into account that this had been the reason for the study to dispense with Terrence Howard and that he signed Don Cheadle to replace him in ‘Iron Man 2’ for a much lower salary, it is not difficult to understand the doubts in that direction.
What does seem clear is that Marvel had been handling the idea of dispensing with Norton for some time, since not even a month passed until it was announced that Mark Ruffalo would be his substitute as the Hulk. I don’t think many have problems with the work done by the latter, but it’s still a shame that the protagonist of ‘American History X’ was left out of the MCU and also that his career has never finished taking flight since then. Let’s see if that changes with the premiere of ‘Daggers in the Back 2’…