The Wasp
Why we want to see her in the movies: There’s no way that Janet Van Dyne shouldn’t be in any Avengers project; one of the founding members of the team in the original comics, she’s stuck around during their entire history, even leading the team on occasion. There’s more to this society-dame-cum-fashion-designer that just being a lame Ant-Man-wannabe, you know.

Wonder Man
Why we want to see him in the movies: Really, it’s just that outfit. Yeah, you could get some pathos out of the story of a man whose attempt to get superpowers placed him in a death-like coma for years, making his brother become his own arch-enemy through misplaced grief, but I just want to see a superhero movie star a guy in a bright red safari jacket. I admit it.

Hawkeye
Why we want to see him in the movies: Handsome, cocky, a bit of a ladies man and even more of an asshole, he’s Han Solo with a bow and arrow. As an added bonus, if they rush the movie into production, he could spoil similar DC hero Green Arrow’s movie debut in Supermax.

Black Widow
Why we want to see her in the movies: The former Russian spy turned superhero didn’t lose any of her alluring wiles when she turned to the (American) good side. Pistol-packing and mysterious, she could be the perfect femme fatale role for budding actresses who aren’t Scarlett Johanssen, Frank Miller.

Starfox
Why we want to see him in the movies: The ideal comedic foil for the movie, Starfox is part of a race of genetically-altered humans called The Eternals, and his superpower is to make women fall in love with him. Sure, there’s more to it than that (It’s all about affecting the chemical balance in the brain, making people happier and more susceptible to suggestion or something), but come on. Who doesn’t see Adam Sandler in a bad wig already?

Tigra
Why we want to see her in the movies: She’s a half-cat, half-woman who fights crime wearing a bikini. Put her in the movie and finally we can judge the size of the furry portion of the movie-going public.

Beast
Why we want to see him in the movies: The rights issue may be a problem, considering he showed up in X-Men: The Last Stand, but just as Dr. Henry McCoy jumped teams in the comic books to become a star in his own right, so should his celluloid version. It’s not like Kelsey Grammer has anything else to do these days, anyway.

Mantis
Why we want to see her in the movies: Of all of Marvel’s characters, Mantis may have the oddest character arc – From Vietnamese prostitute to cosmic goddess “The Celestial Madonna” who ends up marrying an alien possessing and reanimating the corpse of her dead lover. I’d just want to see them try to make that into a movie.

Black Panther
Why we want to see him in the movies: There is absolutely no reason not to have him in the movies. The Panther – who was briefly renamed “Black Leopard” when Marvel became aware of the Black Panther Party – is the scientific equal of Iron Man, the physical equal of Captain America, and man enough for the X-Men’s Storm to fall in love with him. Basically, he’s Marvel’s Batman. Never mind Avengers, he should have his own movie.

So there you have it – Nine potential replacements for whichever big-name actor doesn’t sign on for the ensemble Avengers movie when it goes into production next year. Take that as a warning, Ed Norton.

In an interview with XSI Base Sims explained that Hulk's director, Louis Leterrier, had him chugging away at Hulk concept art even before there was a script.

Sims said he "started with a more basic human look, but still keeping with the iconic Hulk, and it grew from there. After that, I went really over the top to see how far we could push it, and then pulled it back to what you see in the movie."

The Abomination was very different from the comic and Sims explained that they wanted "it to look like it was growing from within and the bones and muscle would break through the skin."

[XSI and Concept Art World]

Is the rest of the world more ready for depressing ecological dystopias that fail to scare or thrill than the US? That would appear to be the message from this weekend's international movie box office results, where - unlike in the United States - M. Night Shyamalan's The Happening outgrossed rival The Incredible Hulk. But, just like Public Enemy once said, don't believe the hype. There's more to this clash of titans than meets the eye.

While it's true that The Happening made $32.1 million to Hulk's $31 million, Marvel's less-than-jolly green giant actually played in less theaters across the world and in each of those theaters, outperformed Shyamalan's dour eco-drama (The actual numbers: Happening played in 5714 theaters across 88 international markets, while Hulk was shown in 3165 theaters across 38 markets). In countries where both movies opened on the same day, Ed Norton's love letter to Bill Bixby outshone 91 minutes of Mark Wahlberg Vs. Trees on a fairly impressive level:

"The Happening" topped $1 million in 10 markets and scored first places in France with $4.7 million, in Spain with $3.8 million and in Italy with $1.9 million — with no competition from "The Incredible Hulk." It finished third in the U.K. with $3.4 million as "Hulk" easily won with $6.3 million and the third frame of "Sex and the City" took in $3.7 million.

"Hulk" generated socko Mexican biz, with $4.6 million, 86% higher than "The Happening," and Universal's biggest launch ever for that territory. The superhero pic also scored in the booming Russian market with $3.7 million, including U's biggest opening day ever on Thursday.

Universal noted "The Incredible Hulk" had easily outperformed 2003's "Hulk" in markets including South Korea, where it took $3.3 million, 88% up on its predecessor. "Hulk" grossed $113 million overseas by the end of its run. "Incredible Hulk" expands next weekend into Italy and Spain and won't face another superhero pic until Sony opens "Hancock" in early July.

The moral of this story for studio bosses? Perhaps it's "Rushing out your spooky-ooky movies worldwide before the big summer movies get released is a good idea," or maybe it's just "South Koreans apparently really, really wanted to see that new Hulk movie." Nonetheless, look at the combined grosses for the two movies and just imagine how big a movie version of Hulk vs. The Rain would be.

Happening beats Hulk overseas [Variety]

In its second weekend, Batman Begins only lost about 44 percent of its box office take, compared with a 63 percent drop-off for Batman And Robin. (And Superman Returns had a 58.5 percent drop-off.) So a lot depends, for the Hulk, on word-of-mouth and reviews. Can the Hulk crush Maxwell Smart this weekend? Few reviewers seem to be saying the Hulk is as great as Batman Begins, and it's possible most of the die-hard fans have seen TIH already. My guess is Hulk will end up doing almost as well as Superman Returns, which is nothing to sneeze at.

The other big surprise success of the weekend was M. Night Shyamalan's much-maligned The Happening, which scored $30.3 million, better than Unbreakable and Lady In The Water. The film will probably make back its $50 million budget, but its success may just hasten the slow death of Shyamalan's career, if the people who saw it decide never to brave one of his movies again. [Box Office Prophets and Box Office Mojo]

If Iron Man was about America's power overseas — specifically in Afghanistan, where much of the movie takes place — then the Incredible Hulk is about what happens to our soldiers when they come home. It's about the impossibility of transforming young men into "super-soldiers" and then expecting them to blend back in. Banner is on a hair-trigger not just because he's pissed off, but because he's traumatized by being under attack and on the run — and because military-sponsored experiments have made him fit only for battle. The whole movie is about Banner's rejection of his fighting-machine identity, and his fight against Emil Blonsky (Tim Roth), who embraces that same identity.

Actually, the new Hulk movie reminded me of nothing so much as Kimberly Peirce's underrated film Stop Loss — both in its depictions of post-traumatic stress, and in the frustrating opaqueness of its actors' performances. Stop Loss dramatizes over and over again how the Iraq war has left a group of soldiers basically unfit for civilian life. They hear gunfire everywhere, they jump at anything, they get fucked up and destroy private property, and they get into fights. In the end, the only environment they're suited for is one where people are constantly trying to kill them. PTSD isn't just an injury to the psyche, it's actually a feature of the constant readiness for shit to go down. PTSD is part of what makes you a better killer.

The idea that PTSD plays a role in Bruce's struggle with Hulkdom is nothing new. In the early Hulk comics, Bruce Banner is repressing tons of unfocused rage, which explodes out of him when he becomes the Hulk. But starting in the early 1980s, writers like Bill Mantlo and Peter David started exploring the idea that Bruce was really struggling with a lot of childhood trauma (from his abusive dad) and this was making him have multiple personalities. (The Hulk being a separate personality that just happens to be able to manifest physically.) And then, of course, Ang Lee decided to take the "abusive dad" backstory and make it into the front-story of his 2003 movie — with disastrous results.

One reason I can buy that Bruce Banner is traumatized, rather than full of repressed anger, is that Ed Norton doesn't seem repressed at all. He seems constantly pissed off and yet wounded at the same time. Sure, we spend a lot of time on his various efforts to control his anger — everything from a metronome to a cute dog — but the main emotion Norton projects is pain and frustration. His Banner is Jesus and Buddha rolled into one — he meditates a lot, he wanders through South America, homeless and scruffy, depending on alms, and he learns purely defensive martial arts so he can avoid having to fight.

We learn early on in the movie that Banner became the Hulk as part of a military experiment to create a new generation of "super-soldiers" — like the boy-scouty Captain America but a zillion times more destructive — and Banner was an early failure. The military wants to capture him so they can experiment on him and make better killers. But Bruce Banner isn't interested in becoming the ultimate killing machine — and that's why the military hates him.

This is a significant departure from the comics, where the military attacks the Hulk because he's constantly going on rampages and endangering innocent people. The comics stick pretty closely to the Godzilla paradigm: the Hulk is a giant monster, and the army has to try and stop him. He Hulks out for all sorts of reasons, and things get ugly when he does. In the movie, by contrast, Banner never, ever turns into the Hulk except when the army attacks him. If the army would just leave him alone, we're told in no uncertain terms, things would be fine.

And the Hulk isn't a particularly great killing machine, even apart from the fact that he only Hulks out when you fire a rocket launcher at him. He pretty much only fights in self defence in this movie, and never just goes on a tear. Even in his totally apeshit Hulk mode, he's pretty happy to live and let live. And he's mopey as often as he's angry — I lost count of how many times the Hulk looked sad, or tired, or just sort of emo, in the new movie. That's not to say the Hulk doesn't get super-violent in the new movie — he does, as you've probably seen in the trailers. He does the thunderclap-hands, he smashes a sonic-weapon truck, he rips a car in half and uses it as brass knuckles, etc.

So the military wants to turn the Hulk into a weapon, and make a ton of slightly more intelligent Hulks, to go and thrash anybody who fucks with America. The army, as personified by William Hurt's General "Thunderbolt" Ross and Roth's Blonsky, are green with envy (sorry) when they look at the Hulk. They don't see a menace to be vanquished, they see a world-beating ubermensch that could be them. And there are various moments when both Ross and Blonsky express disdain for Banner's pacifism and disgust at his unwillingness to revel in his power.

And it's not much of a spoiler that Blonsky embarks on a quest to turn himself into the Hulk's equal. There's a weirdly unconvincing scene, after the Hulk first trounces Blonsky's soldiers, where he's talking with General Ross. Blonsky remarks on the fact that Ross sent his team in cold, without telling them what they would be facing, and didn't equip them for the situation they were going into. The next logical statement ought to be, "so screw you and your suicide missions." Instead, Blonsky gets a twinkle in his eye and says he'd like another crack at the Hulk. And that's when Ross offers Blonsky his first shot at becoming a super-soldier himself.

About the only character development Blonsky gets is when we learn that he's at an age where he should have a desk job, but he just wants to keep fighting. The only thing he's good at is mayhem, and he wants to stick to what he knows. He's willing to pay the price — including some hideously painful injections, and a full-body fracture at one point — to keep kicking ass. The contrast between Blonsky's masochism and Banner's anguished trauma shows us the difference between a man who embraces his inner murderer, and one who rejects it.

There are two meta-issues that are hard to ignore when you're watching The Incredible Hulk. Ang Lee's Hulk movie only came out five years ago, and the new movie sort of acknowledges this by saying that Banner has been the Hulk for five years. It also retells the Hulk's origin very briskly in the opening credits, making some changes from the Lee version but mostly just establishing the basics. The other big meta-issue is the fight between star/co-writer Ed Norton and Marvel over the movie's edit. I went into the film thinking Marvel had probably saved us from a tedious angst-fest by slicing some of Norton's favorite scenes out of the movie, but then I was struck by how weirdly choppy it was in parts. I saw the film with someone who hadn't heard about the dispute, and she remarked afterwards that it felt as though some crucial scenes were edited out. (In particular, Betty Ross (Liv Tyler) ditches her boyfriend to go off with Bruce, and it's never dealt with. We never even see the two of them talk about it at all. There are also a few individual scenes which feel jumpy.) I have a feeling the Ed Norton cut might actually be a lot more satisfying and interesting. And as fun as it is, TIH might be worth waiting to see on DVD, if your TV is big enough.

It's almost impossible to avoid comparing the Hulk to Iron Man: they're both about a guy who creates super-weapons and feels remorse. They both feature heroes whose bodies become the ultimate weapons. And they both show their main actors shirtless for long stretches as they obsess about their hearts — though Ed Norton is trying to keep his heart from speeding up, and Robert Downey Jr. is trying to keep his heart from stopping. Both heroes try to prevent anybody else from wielding the weapons they've created. And they both end up fighting an enemy who's similar to them, but more ruthless and bloodthirsty.

There are a few big differences between Iron Man and Incredible Hulk, though: Iron Man is more fun. (Iron Man has a heavy-metal score, I can barely remember Hulk's score but it was pretty standard orchestral music.) Iron Man is fairly pro-military and includes a sympathetic military character, Jim Rhodes, while the military characters in Hulk are pretty much all assholes. Iron Man transcends its comic book source material, while Hulk does justice to its comics origins without improving on them. Hulk has more random fuck-yeah moments than Iron Man, and they feel a bit more calculated — but that doesn't stop them being awesome. Bottom line: Hulk is better than 90 percent of superhero movies, but not as good as Batman Begins, Iron Man, Spider-Man 1 or 2, or the first two X-Men movies.

Created both as a primer to bring new moviegoing fans up to date with the character's status in the comics and also as an introduction to this week's Skaar, Son of Hulk series, the digital comic - Sorry, people who hate the shitty Flash-based interface of Marvel's official digital comic site - does its best to quickly run through the last couple of years of Hulk comics in ten pages, telling you all you need to know about how the best laid plans of Iron Man and Mr. Fantastic resulted in the destruction of a planet and getting their asses kicked by grumpy aliens as a result. Sure, you miss out on the subtlety and explosions for the most part, but that's the kind of thing that you have to pay money for.

Hulk Saga [Marvel.com]

Marvel Comics leads the movie tie-ins with a couple of Hulk-related books. The wonderfully-named Hulk: Raging Thunder brings back Thundra (A superstrong Amazon who hated anything with a penis but had a crush on the Fantastic Four’s Ben Grimm, making you wonder about his particularly rocky manhood, and no, I promise I’m not making this up) and gives her a large green specimen of the less fair sex to beat up on. Gender issues have rarely been this violent, true believer! Luckily, the second gamma-irradiated launch this week deals with much more traditional superhero fare, like absent fathers and aliens having stupid names: Skaar, Son of Hulk spins out of the year-long “Planet Hulk” storyline and stars the half-alien bastard son of Bruce Banner’s alter ego, a teenager with green skin and smashing on his adolescent mind as he deals with life in outer space. How can you resist?

(Marvel’s really concentrating on the SF this week – They’re also putting out an anthology of Secret Invasion-related shorts called Who Do You Trust?, the first issue of a new series based on Jack Kirby’s awesome Eternals, a trade of the first half of Kirby’s run on that title, and a collection of the recent, zen, Silver Surfer series, In Thy Name. There’s also a hardback collection of the last Marvel Zombies series, as well. Yes, they are trying to bankrupt you.)

Dark Horse are also concentrating on the tie-in dollar, with a raft of Hellboy product. If the first issue of a new series starring Hellboy’s (former) employers, the BPRD, isn’t enough for you (It’s called War on Frogs, which should really be all you need to know), then there’s also a set of three miniature plastic figures of characters from the series. There's also the Hellboy Book and Figure Set, putting together a Hellboy action figure and hardback digest version of Hellboy's first adventure to make the perfect gift for the Guillermo Del Toro fan in your life.

DC, meanwhile, are throwing their weight behind The Joker: The Greatest Stories Ever Told (a collection of stories from the history of Heath Ledger’s favorite Bat-villain.) Plus the first issue of the comic book version of NBC’s Chuck, proving that… well, they’re not really all about the multimedia this week after all. Much more interesting from Superman’s home team is the hardcover collection The Question: The Five Books of Blood, bringing Greg Rucka’s lesbian noir hero into her own for all of you faceless fetishists out there. She used to be on the Batman cartoon, do you think that counts…?

As ever, the full list of this week’s releases can be found here, with your very own low-tech comic store GPS being found here. Just remember, make sure that you're only buying something that has at least an option taken out on it.

As if you needed another reason to go and see The Incredible Hulk outside of the possibility of another gamma-irradiated box office bomb and a cameo from Robert Downey Jr.'s Tony Stark, director Louis Letterier let slip a pretty big, previously-unknown, potential guest shot this weekend. One that ties in with both Iron Man and also two future Marvel movies. Spoilers after the jump.

According to an interview on G4's Attack of the Show, next weekend's Hulk movie may feature the first movie appearance of a certain star-spangled Avenger. Letterier explained:

Did you know that in Iron Man, there's the Captain America shield? Okay, good... In Hulk, you might see Captain America himself.

It's already been announced that we're going to get a movie tentatively called The First Avenger: Captain America in 2011, ahead of that summer's The Avengers team-up between Iron Man, Thor et al. Does the possible Cap cameo in Hulk mean that the Marvel movies are going down the Ultimates route of having the creation of the Hulk come from an attempt to duplicate the formula that created Captain America in the 1940s?

Expect all to be revealed this weekend.

Louis Leterrier Talks 'Hulk' [G4.com]

Tony Stark, ladies and gentleman. Robert Downey Jr. makes one of the many Marvel cameos that are slowly linking the movie versions of the Marvel Universe together. So who else is going to be cameoing in this movie, I wonder. And if this trend keeps on going, who will appear in the future Marvel picture The Avengers? [Moviebox]

[IESB]

Deflecting bullets and taking down a helicopter with one toss, the Hulk protects his lady love Betty Ross (Liv Tyler) who just happened upon the military attack in the park.

It speaks! Blonsky, in his altered state, chides the Hulk during their big-city throw down.

See a few seconds of Edward Norton changing.

Update: 5th Hulk Clip

Blonsky, when will you learn bullets and bombs are no match for the Hulk.
[Yahoo, MTV , IGN and Moviefone]

Apparently the green concoction in the background of one of these images is the "super-soldier serum" developed during World War II. It's shown to Emil Blonsky (Tim Roth) when he prepares to take the shot that turns him into the Abomination, the Hulk's sparring partner. And that's the serum that turned Steve Rogers, a weakling volunteer, into the fighting machine, Captain America. [Latino Review]

[Empire Online via Ain't It Cool and Slashfilm]