It's common knowledge that The Incredible Hulk star Edward Norton had a pretty big falling out with Marvel Studios chief Kevin Feige eitther during production or after the movie's release (which is why Mark Ruffalo was ultimately cast in the role of Bruce Banner in The Avengers), and some more details on what exactly led to the bad blood have now come to light.
Norton has previously revealed that he wanted a more serious tone, and laid out his an idea for a two-film arc that would have been a lot darker than the movie we ended up with.
“What Chris Nolan had done with Batman was going down a path that I aligned with: long, dark and serious,” Norton told The New York Times in 2019. “And they were like, ‘That’s what we want!’ As it turned out, that wasn’t what they wanted.”
During a recent watch-along of The Incredible Hulk on Happy Sad Confused, director Louis Leterrier revealed that he shared Norton's opinion that the movie should be a little more serious, but this wasn't the only thing that the actor and Marvel Studios disagreed on.
"Frankly, it’s maybe [because of the soundtrack],” said the filmmaker. “I don’t remember if it was the teaser or the overall soundtrack, but Edward is great friends with Thom Yorke and he wanted Radiohead to do the music and that was genius, but we know what Radiohead sounds like and I think Marvel was pushing for a little bit more of a typical Hollywood soundtrack and we thought a compromise, not a compromise, but the elegant in-between was to find [composer] Craig Armstrong who had worked with Massive Attack to create a soundtrack which is haunting.”
Leterrier added that, in Norton's version of the script, the Green Goliath didn't actually make an appearance until 40 minutes in, which was never going to fly with the studio.
“You don’t wanna wait for the Hulk and look at your watch and think, ‘When is the Hulk coming?’” Leterrier noted. “You want to love the movie with Bruce banner and everyone else and actually fear the moment when the Hulk arrives. So you have this dichotomy of these two movies that are fighting with each other And the only way to do with it is a great script and frankly, amazing, actors, so you cast the hell out of it, so you cast actors who really clash well on screen, and seemingly don’t like each other, because that works really well, you bring the tension. And William Hurt , gives you that.”
Leterrier finishes up by stating that he loved working with Norton, and was "surprised" when he was told that he wuld not be returning as the Hulk.
“I don’t know if he thinks I was part of the other guys... whatever. I was neutral. I was literally like, let’s just make the best movie possible, and even after he was gone I was asking him what he thought about some ideas, so I just wanted him to be proud of this movie.”
Check out video below for more.