What If…? Finale’s Future Hulk Variant, Explained

The Hulk’s future imperfect self has smashed into the Marvel Cinematic Universe. In the Marvel animated series What If…?, Uatu the Watcher (Jeffrey Wright) has pondered such questions as, “What If… the World Lost Its Mightiest Heroes?” (which saw the Hulk and other Avengers assassinated by a rogue Hank Pym), “What If… Zombies?!” (where Hulk died fighting an undead Scarlet Witch and her zombie hordes), and “What If… the Hulk Fought the Mech Avengers?,” (a reality where the Avengers assembled a Mighty Avenger mecha to battle the Mega-Hulk and his rampaging Gamma Beasts).

But what if… the Hulk was the dictator of Dystopia? And what if the Hulk was a Master of the Mystic Arts as the smashing Sorcerer Supreme? Wednesday’s What If…? series finale teased such an amalgamation in an ending sequence that showed glimpses of the infinite realities across the Marvel multiverse, including mashups like Weapon Infinity (Wolverine/Thanos), Shang-Chi Star-Lord, and the X-Men’s Jubilee as the Silver Surfer, cosmic herald of Galactus.

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In the comics, the older, gray-bearded Hulk is known as Maestro: an insane version of the Hulk from a possible future where Earth was devastated by global nuclear war. But Bruce Banner — who was transformed into the Hulk when he was bombarded with the gamma radiation from a gamma bomb — survived and came to rule this post-apocalyptic future.

Introduced in 1992’s Hulk: Future Imperfect #1, penned by prolific Incredible Hulk scribe Peter David, the Maestro had the brains of Bruce Banner and the brawn of the Hulk. He was empowered by the nuclear radiation that turned most of the planet into wastelands, and with the world’s superheroes long dead, there was no one powerful enough to stop the raging ruler of Dystopia.

When an older Rick Jones used Doctor Doom’s time machine and pulled the present-day Professor Hulk (the smart version of Banner’s green-skinned alter-ego) 90 years into the future, he revealed that the Maestro was the future Hulk, the last of the superheroes. Over the decades, Rick scavenged relics from the age of Marvels: Iron Man’s armors, Captain America’s shield, and Thor’s hammer were among Rick’s collection.

Maestro attempted to squash a rebellion mounted by his old friend Rick, leader of the freedom fighters hunted by Maestro’s Gravity Police and their robotic Dogs of War. The Maestro challenged “puny Banner” to a fight that ended with Maestro snapping his past self’s neck. As the Hulk recovered from his injuries, Maestro explained that the alternate timeline was created when Rick’s outlaws pulled the Hulk into the future — in this branch, Maestro is the Hulk unhampered by Bruce Banner.

After Maestro killed Rick — who was impaled on the remains of Wolverine’s adamantium skeleton — the Hulk confronted Maestro a second time, wielding Captain America’s shield in battle. “I’m simply the final product of natural selection,” Maestro told Hulk. “The strong survive. I’m the strongest. I survived.” As Maestro declared himself “the future,” the Hulk told him he was wrong: “You’re history.”

Hulk lured Maestro into Doom’s time machine and sent him to the past: to ground zero, the desert test site where the G-bomb detonated on that fateful day decades earlier.

While Maestro was seemingly destroyed in the same gamma nuke blast that birthed the Hulk, the villainous Hulk would eventually return when God Emperor Doom — using the cosmic power of the Beyonders — created the patchwork planet Battleworld during the events of 2015’s Secret Wars.

All episodes of Marvel’s What If…? are now streaming on Disney+.