Mark Ruffalo says standalone Hulk movie is "further away" than ever

Since punching Thor off screen and rag-dolling Loki in 2012’s Avengers Assemble, audiences have been clamouring for more Hulk. Mark Ruffalo’s portrayal of Bruce Banner and his alter-ego has gone down extremely well with critics and fans alike, and with this year’s Avengers: Age of Ultron affording Ruffalo the opportunity to do more with the role, the possibilities seem endless.

In an interview with USA Today, Ruffalo gave an update on how close we are to a Hulk standalone movie. Sadly for fans of the jade giant, the prognosis does not look good: “Actually, it feels even further away. It’s not Marvel’s property, it’s Universal’s property. I don’t know. It seems really problematic. I’ve been around long enough to be OK with it. There’s only so much that’s in my power and I’m not going to agonize over what is not in my power… I’d love to do it, it’d be really fun. There’s a lot still to do with the character. I always try to think about different places we could go with him.

“I’m angling for it. I don’t know if it’ll happen now, but at some point I’d like to see it happen. When I was doing Age of Ultron – doing the Scarlet Witch acid trip scenes – it really took me a long time to figure out what the Hulk would be afraid of. And then I realized, it was Banner. That relationship is what we’re all so into, but we’ve never seen them in the same scene together… I always imagined that that could be pretty exciting if we could pull it off.”

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The next time we’ll see Ruffalo’s Banner hulking out will be in Thor: Ragnarok, with the actor confirming he's spoken with director Taika Waititi: “I don’t know what the story is yet, but it’ll be [Loki] and Thor, and then I’ll be in there here and there. But I don’t know any of the particulars yet… Chris [Hemsworth] and I have a really good time together, we goof off and play around when Tom Hiddleston is around. So it’ll be a lot of funny back-and-forth… It’ll have that kind of antagonistic ‘Odd Couple’-thing going on.” We can't wait!

Amon is a contributing editor and columnist for Empire magazine, but is also a Film and TV writer for GamesRadar+, Total Film, and others. He has also written for NME, Composer Mag, and more, along with being a film critic for TalkSport. He is also the co-host of the Fade to Black Podcast, and a video mashup creator. Can also do a pretty good Bane impersonation.