In May, Wired posted a video detailing the visual effects ILM (Industrial Light & Magic) conjured up for Joss Whedon’s Avengers: Age of Ultron and revealing initial plans to have The Hulk’s skin color turn grey to convey Scarlet Witch’s mental manipulation that left him with uncontrollable rage. In the end, they decided to “just changed his eyes to make them look more sullen when he is under the control of Scarlet Witch.”
Screen Rant recently spoke with Avengers: Age of Ultron VFX supervisor Christopher Townsend and was able to extract some new details about the grey Hulk. “What Joss wanted to do was he said, ‘I wanted to have a Hulk that’s this berserker Hulk.’ Berserker Hulk was this Hulk that Hulks out, was what we had come up with on set. And then we sort of started talking about, ‘Well what are those extremes?’ And ILM started playing with a deformed body with a deformed face with one eye larger than another. You know, like crooked teeth, and drooling, and red eyes, and all this kind of stuff,” Townsend explained. “Then we started playing with color and we started to de-saturate him and give him sort of red around his eyes and made him look strung-out heroin addict Hulk was the idea. Sort of like where he has totally lost it and he’s gone totally crazy. And then we gradually tended towards a grayer and grayer version till effectively we got gray Hulk.”
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Grey Hulk didn’t make the cut because in the end they had concerns about audiences being confused. Why? Well, a grey-skinned Hulk can me several things. First, it was the original color Stan Lee chose for The Hulk but a printing issue forced him to go green. Secondly, a change in skin color to The Hulk almost always signals in the comic books that a dramatic personality change has occurred, essentially making a new character. Lastly, a grey-skinned Hulk, Joe Fixit, already exists in Marvel and audiences might believe Fixit is being introduced in the cinematic universe when that wasn’t Whedon’s intention.
“We tried a few shots in the film with that sort of much grayer version,” he said. “And then we’re thinking, ‘Will people confuse this with the gray Hulk from the comics? And is that a good thing or a bad thing?’ Eventually, I think we backed off a little bit of that and made him greener so that…we didn’t want to confuse people in creating a new character, per se, in that way. So we ultimately backed off. But we had gone pretty extreme in the looks for him.”
he epic follow-up to the biggest Super Hero movie of all time. When Tony Stark tries to jumpstart a dormant peacekeeping program, things go awry and Earth’s Mightiest Heroes, including Iron Man, Captain America, Thor, The Incredible Hulk, Black Widow and Hawkeye, are put to the ultimate test as the fate of the planet hangs in the balance. As the villainous Ultron emerges, it is up to the Avengers to stop him from enacting his terrible plans, and soon uneasy alliances and unexpected action pave the way for an epic and unique global adventure.
Marvel’s Avengers: Age of Ultron coming to 3D Digital and Digital HD on September 8 and to 3D Blu-ray, Blu-ray, DVD, Digital SD and VOD on October 2!
