Brand New Day officially brings back an abandoned Avenger

The Hulk of the popular imagination is the classic edition: the Green Goliath, the angry child with the strength of gods, who can’t get out a complete sentence but can kick an Abrams tank into low orbit. The Hulk has been through a lot of changes in his 64-year publication history, but the most enduring version of the character is the first: the fan-nicknamed “Savage Hulk.”

Spider-Man: Brand New Day will feature the sudden return of the original Hulk, mostly at Peter Parker’s expense. That led to the surprising realization, at least here at Polygon, that it’s been at least nine years since the Savage Hulk had any significant screen time in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

That goes all the way back to Thor: Ragnarok, Taika Waititi’s peculiar cinematic beerslam that combined Marvel’s take on Norse mythology with Marvel’s Planet Hulk storyline. After being exiled from Earth at the end of Age of Ultron, the Hulk had found fame, a certain amount of happiness, and apparently a romantic partner as a gladiator on the alien world of Sakaar.

Ragnarok led directly into 2018’s Avengers: Infinity War, where Hulk suffered what might be his first real on-camera defeat. Thanos didn’t simply kick Hulk out of his ship or figure out a way to turn him back to Bruce Banner, but met him on an equal playing field (for values of “equal” that include “already had two of the Infinity Gems”) and beat him into the ground.

That left a traumatized Hulk unwilling to reemerge for the rest of Infinity War, so Bruce Banner got all the screen time, doing his fighting from inside one of Tony Stark’s Hulkbuster suits. That in turn went a long way towards explaining why the Battle of Wakanda actually happened at all. While Thanos’s forces had a lot of firepower on deck, no battle plan survives direct contact with the Hulk. The Chitauri could’ve told you that.

The next time we see the Hulk, it’s five years later in Avengers: Endgame, where he’s gone through an off-screen transformation. As explained during the She-Hulk TV show, Banner used research funding from Tony Stark to build a beachfront laboratory. There, he integrated the two sides of his personality in order to become the “Smart Hulk,” with the help of his wrist-worn Hulk Inhibitor Device. Fast forward to Brand New Day and Banner has seemingly used that device to permanently revert to his human form. “If you see me with this off, run,” he warns Parker in a June 17 trailer.

The Hulk’s multi-film transformation was, in retrospect, a weird but explicable choice. Endgame began with Stark on the outs with the other Avengers (again), and almost every other established super-scientist in the MCU at the time had been a victim of the “Blip”: Shuri, T’Challa, Hank Pym, etc. That left Bruce Banner as the only big brain standing, so Endgame speeds past a major character moment for him in order to set up the time heist. It’s disappointing as a viewer, but it is what it is.

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Smart Hulk wasn’t a permanent situation, as we saw Banner in human form during Shang-Chi‘s post-credits scene. However, “Smart Hulk” has been the character’s status quo until this year. One way or another, it looks like Brand New Day will be the first appearance in the MCU of one of the classic Marvel fights: Spider-Man vs. the Hulk.

In-universe, this also means that it could be the first time for years that New York City has seen a genuine Hulk rampage. As we saw in Endgame, “Smart Hulk” was popular to the point of almost being a local celebrity, but it hasn’t been that long since the Hulk’s best-known work was racking up millions of dollars in property damage. The last big public Hulk incident in the MCU’s timeline was technically the Battle of Sokovia in Age of Ultron, which was roughly 13 years before the events of Brand New Day.

Image: Marvel/Everett Collection

If the MCU wasn’t about to have a big Doctor Doom-shaped problem, that’s the kind of thing that could set up some real PR issues for Earth’s superhuman community. The last thing anyone in Marvel’s New York wants right about now, considering everything else that’s happened lately, is the random chance that Banner will get upset again and powerbomb Brooklyn into Harlem.

However, while Mark Ruffalo has said he isn’t in Avengers: Doomsday, the events of Brand New Day do potentially put a big Hulk-shaped Checkov’s gun back on the table for next year’s Secret Wars. Whatever shape the MCU is in by that point, whether it’s “just” a big superhuman brawl like 1984’s Secret Wars or a multiversal calamity like 2015’s, the Hulk is a potential game-changer in any situation he’s in.

In the short term, there have been quite a few classic Spidey vs. Hulk brawls in Marvel’s comics history. In Brand New Day, with Peter’s powers apparently evolving in a vaguely The Other-esque direction and Bruce’s inhibitor going offline at a bad time, we’re at least in for a long-overdue cinematic rendition of one of comics’ greatest fights.

Spider-Man: Brand New Day releases in theaters on July 31.