Smart Hulk In Iron Man’s Lab VFX Test Released

A lot has been made of Professor Hulk’s emergence in Avengers: Endgame, or rather that people didn’t get to see the moment on screen. Well, now a VFX test focusing on Bruce Banner in that ascended state has popped up online and people are wondering why this moment didn’t make the final cut. (You can catch the rougher version of the scene here below) Everything begins with Hulk sitting at a computer in a Stark lab. He’s trying to run a test and then everything goes sideways. Upon hearing the alarms and failing the experiment, Banner punches the screen and complains that nobody ever trusts him because they’re afraid he’s going to screw up. Then, after causing all that property damage, he apologizes to Captain America. It’s a bit emotional and funny, but that wasn’t the path this film was going to take.

Plenty of people were looking for an expectation when Smart Hulk turned up in Avengers: Endgame. That revelation coming off-screen made a lot of people confused as to why that decision was made.

“We wanted to track how every one of the Avengers was moving forward from the experience of Infinity War,” Anthony Russo began. “Banner is left with this reality that neither version of himself could stop Thanos. So he dedicates himself to making sure this never happens again. And that is sort of the proper motivation for him to finally figure out how to reconcile the two sides of himself.”

In the theatrical version of Infinity War, Hulk isn’t exactly leaping at the chance to get that rematch with Thanos. Banner loses as well by the end of the film and is left to cope with that “L” for a long time. Smart Hulk had to be arrived at carefully and Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely revealed how their plans had to change before Endgame.

“We wrote [Infinity War], we shot it, and then went on to shoot most of Endgame,” Markus offered. “And it was: he achieved union with the Hulk while inside the Hulkbuster, burst out, and kicked Cull Obsidian’s ass. And it didn’t work. It was completely the wrong tone for that moment in the movie. It was this victory when we were headed toward a crushing defeat, and it was tone-deaf. But we had already shot Endgame, where he was already Smart Hulk.”

“Also, it’s like, you get it. Part of the thing we learn every time you write a movie — and particularly a movie where it’s a continuing storyline — you don’t have to explain as much as you think you have to. You can go to Queens, people know who Spider-Man is,” Markus added. “I don’t need to see him get bitten by the spider again. Like, ‘okay, he’s a combination of Hulk and Banner, I get it.’ Just give me a crumb as to how it happened.”