Avengers Endgame: Mystery of Smart Hulk’s Location During Iron Man’s Death Revealed

Smart Hulk was surprisingly absent during Tony Stark’s death scene in Avengers: Endgame. But, now people are realizing he was right there after all. In the special features of the film’s home video release, the deleted scene with various heroes kneeling in honor of their fallen friend holds the secret. Smart Hulk might not be front and center, but the abbreviated scene in the movie doesn’t convey where he is in the aftermath. If you look closely, He’s slightly to the left of the Black Panther crew when all the characters begin their tribute to Iron Man. There has been a ton of discussion around how Iron Man was treated when contrasted against Black Widow and Vision. But it was clear that everyone felt the weight for Tony Stark at that moment.

“In Endgame, the fans were upset that Natasha did not have a funeral. Whereas Scarlett, when I spoke to her about it, said Natasha wouldn’t have wanted a funeral,” Black Widow director Cate Shortland told Empire. “She’s too private, and anyway, people don’t really know who she is. So what we did in this film was allow the ending to be the grief the individuals felt, rather than a big public outpouring. I think that’s a fitting ending for her.”

Comicbook.com had the opportunity to speak with Weta Digital’s Matt Aitken about the now-iconic scene. The team knew that they were dealing with one of the weightiest scenes in the entire Marvel Cinematic Universe from the word go.

“Oh, absolutely. That was huge,” Aitken said about the immense pressures involved in getting Stark’s death bed scene right. “Again, there was a balancing act to achieve there. We had to make sure that his wounds looked severe enough to be fatal, there couldn’t be any doubts about that, that’s the whole point of his sacrifice. But we had to allow him to keep his dignity through that sequence, that was something that the filmmakers made very clear to us, that they didn’t want it to be so over the top gory that it lost its seriousness and it could have turned almost into a farce if you’d gone too far with it.”

“We did several different versions of that. We approached it initially through concept art, and we worked up lots of different levels of damage through concept art and reviewed that with the filmmakers at Marvel,” the VFX guru added. “Then we worked that up in CG as a digital prosthetic and that was great because that gave us the opportunity to review the level of damage in the cast and make changes accordingly.”

What do you think Marvel will do with Hulk next? Let us know down in the comments!