The first trailer for Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings revealed that The Incredible Hulk's Emil Blonsky, aka Abomination, would be making his return to the MCU, as we saw him doing battle with Wong in what was believed to be some kind of tournament.
As it turned out, the "tournament" was actually an underground fight club run by Shang-Chi's sister Xialing, and Wong and Blonsky were on good terms, with the Sorcerer appearing to serve as a mentor of sorts to the monstrous former(?) villain.
Abomination looked a lot closer to his comic book counterpart in the movie, but it's now come to light that VFX artists actually used the original CG model of the character from The Incredible Hulk as a reference for his Shang-Chi scenes.
VFX supervisor Dominik Zimmerle delves into the process during an interview with Before and Afters.
"We also received the original setups from Doctor Strange and from the Avengers movies so that we could repurpose those," he revealed when asked about the challenges of putting the portal sequences together. "The challenge was here to do the slow down effect with the portal and still maintaining the feeling that this portal is working. The portal look is very much relying on the motion of the sparks, and basically to underline the slow down effect, we took this motion blur out and had it then basically go into sparks for the slow down effect when accelerating up again."
Be sure to check out the full interview at the link below, which also includes some new before-and-after VFX shots.
Blonsky is set to return for the Disney+ She-Hulk series, but based on what we saw in Shang-Chi, there's a good chance he'll actually be an ally to Jennifer Walters.