Getting Ready for ‘Captain America: Brave New World’? Revisiting Ed Norton’s 2008 Film ‘The Incredible Hulk’ is a Must! (No Joke!)

If you’ve been using your Disney+ subscription to revisit the previous Captain America movies before going to see Captain America: Brave New World in theaters this weekend, you might want to adjust your expectations. While Brave New World does tie back to those films – Sam Wilson (played by Anthony Mackie) was introduced in Captain America: The Winter Soldier and played a significant role in Captain America: Civil War – its storyline and characters have stronger connections to the Disney+ series The Falcon and the Winter Soldier and the 2008 film The Incredible Hulk, which is often overlooked in the MCU.

It’s understandable why The Incredible Hulk isn’t a focal point for fans or Marvel. Released as the second MCU movie by Universal Pictures during Marvel’s partnership with Paramount, it followed closely after the success of Iron Man. Despite featuring a cameo by Robert Downey Jr. to establish its place in the shared universe, The Incredible Hulk was somewhat overshadowed by the previous 2003 adaptation directed by Ang Lee. The 2008 film quickly establishes Bruce Banner’s backstory in the opening credits and continues his journey in Brazil, picking up where the 2003 movie left off. While there are nods to events from the earlier film, The Incredible Hulk maintains a vague enough narrative that it could be seen as a standalone sequel to casual viewers, despite the notable shifts in tone, style, and cast.

This soft-reboot strategy mirrors the practical and straightforward nature of the 2008 Hulk film. While it appears cohesive on screen, there was backstage tension between lead actor Edward Norton, who also contributed substantial uncredited rewrites to the script, and the production studios. Norton pushed for a longer runtime to differentiate the movie from the Ang Lee version, a move that clashes with the streamlined and audience-friendly approach favored by the studios. Interestingly, Norton’s desire for more storytelling room contrasts with later MCU entries, which embrace longer runtimes to explore narratives deeply and distinctly within the franchise.

The current MCU is so confident, in fact, that Brave New World reaches back to 2008 in a way that feels like a left-field pull. Granted, Brave New World does feature a well-advertised appearance from Red Hulk who, like this Cap, is a combination of one established character underneath and a different character on the surface. (Red Hulk doesn’t emerge until late in the movie, but nearly every ad has blown this appearance far in advance.) But Red Hulk’s human counterpart, Thaddeus “Thunderbolt” Ross, isn’t even played by the same actor as in the 2008 film where he debuted. There, and in several subsequent MCU movies, he was played by the late William Hurt; now the character has been recast with the legendary Harrison Ford, just as Norton was recast with Mark Ruffalo for The Avengers (and in every Hulk appearance going forward). Brave New World also features the return of Tim Blake Nelson as The Leader, a character whose very comic-book-y mutation began in The Incredible Hulk after he was exposed to Banner’s blood (which he had hoped to use in medical research, which Banner would not agree to). So a refresher on The Incredible Hulk would prove surprisingly helpful in following Brave New World.

For hardcore fans, it’s sort of neat to see a movie with “Captain America” in the title zig-zag toward a bunch of Hulk lore; ah, the strange whims of the comic-book universe! But it’s also a deeply strange choice, because the MCU of 2025 looks very different from the nascent 2008 version. Hulk ’08, directed by Louis Leterrier, is both a slickly underwhelming comic-book thriller of few ideas, and a vastly more propulsive and better-looking superhero story than much of what the MCU has managed in recent years. For example, it takes far better advantage of Norton’s wiry, testy intelligence than anything Brave New World is able to muster from Mackie’s considerable charisma, and the action sequences have a lot more visual zest than the new movie.

I’m not suggesting that Leterrier is a better director than Julius Onah, who made Brave New World and also a terrific, underseen social drama called Luce. It’s more that Brave New World could use a little bit of what The Incredible Hulk has – not in terms of its actual plotlines, which are almost shockingly negligible, tying up loose ends no one was wondering about, but in its willingness to just make a dumb-fun action-fantasy picture. Marvel movies can be more than that, for sure. But Brave New World sure isn’t, and it isn’t much fun, either, so what are we doing here? The Incredible Hulk isn’t nearly the movie Ang Lee’s Hulk is, nevermind the level of Black Panther or The Avengers. Yet for a longtime go-to choice for the MCU’s worst, it’s looking better all the time.

Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.