A physicist whose own experiment left him sharing a body with something enormous and angry, and who spends fifteen years negotiating with it instead of curing it.
Bruce Banner is a renowned physicist with seven doctorates who spends most of his screen time trying not to be in the room. He agreed to a Culver University experiment that Thaddeus Ross described as work on gamma immunity, and which was in fact an attempt to rebuild the super soldier programme. It went wrong in the way that defines the rest of his life.
The interesting choice the films make is that nobody ever cures him. He tries, early and seriously, working with a stranger he only knows as Mr. Blue, and after that the story stops treating the Hulk as an illness and starts treating him as a roommate. Banner learns yoga to keep the Hulk down, then spends years failing to keep him down, and eventually sits in a lab in Mexico that Stark built for him and negotiates a merger instead.
That is why his arc reads differently from everyone else’s. Steve Rogers has to decide what to do. Tony Stark has to decide what to build. Banner has to decide how much of himself he is willing to give up in order to be useful, and the answer changes every film.
Show detailsTwo actors, one character
Edward Norton plays Banner in The Incredible Hulk. Mark Ruffalo has played him in everything since. Kevin Feige has said the studio chose not to bring Norton back; Norton has said the decision was his, because he did not want to be tied to a single character for years.
The recasting is also why The Incredible Hulk is the entry people most often forget belongs to this continuity at all. The other reason is contractual: Universal holds distribution rights to standalone Hulk films, which is a large part of why the Hulk keeps turning up in other people’s films and never again in one of his own.
Major spoiler
The gauntlet is his. He is the one who puts it on and reverses the Blip, and it costs him the use of his right arm. He also admits, afterwards, that he tried to use the Stones to bring Natasha Romanoff back and that it did not work.