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Ed Norton: New Hulk will be the Batman Begins of the Franchise

Posted by Michelle Graham (michelle@filmschoolrejects.com) on January 23, 2008

If anyone else out there went to see Ang Lee’s Hulk back in 2003 (and I feel your pain if you did, I sat through it too), rest assured, Edward Norton’s version is in no way connected to it. While that was quite universally panned as dreary, dull and dreadful, there are higher hopes for this reset of the story.

“First off it’s utterly unrelated to that film,” he said, when speaking to Total Film. “This is in no way a response to it or picking up from it. I think like Chris Nolan and those guys did with Batman, we just said: ‘We’re going to start completely with our own version of this myth or saga.’”

As Hulk fans around the world breathe a collective sigh of relief upon reading this, there is more good news to come. According to Norton, this is not the first time he’s been offered the role of the green giant.

“When the phone rings and someone says, ‘Hey, would you be interested in the big green guy?” there’s that part of all of us that doesn’t want to look like an idiot,” he admitted. “There’s the wince factor or the defensive part of you that recoils at what the bad version of what that would be. And I did that, basically. I said ‘no’ to it a couple of times.”

So if he refused the part not just once, but several times, why would he finally say change his mind? The answer - because he was allowed to rewrite the screenplay. So, if Ed Norton was picky enough to refuse until he could make it good enough for his high standards (hey, he was in Fight Club and American History X, he knows what’s good and what’s not), it should hopefully be good enough for the cinema-dwellers, and he says they don’t plan for it to stop here.

“To me the whole thing was to envision it in multiple parts,” he said. “We left a lot out on purpose. It’s definitely intended as chapter one.”

So, barring The Incredible Hulk following its brother movie down the path of global detestation, we may soon have a new superhero franchise on our hands.


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