Ang Lee's Hulk Is Marvel's Batman Returns (Which Makes It Good)
Hulk is the Marvel movie equivalent of Batman Returns, and that shows its strengths despite its mixed reception. Directed by Ang Lee, hot of the success of Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, Hulk was released to divisive reviews in the summer of 2003. It's $245.5m worldwide haul, while respectable, also made Hulk a moderate financial disappointment, leading to the Hulk being rebooted in 2008 with The Incredible Hulk as the second film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. However, thanks this apparent attempt to eradicate its legacy, the movie shares an unlikely relationship with Tim Burton's Batman sequel.
Nearly two decades after its release, Hulk's place among superhero movies is, in a word, different. Hulk isn't simply a dark movie, but also an extremely surreal one, often literally becoming a cinematic comic book – highlighted by scenes such as the fight between the titular green protagonist and actor Nick Nolte's David Banner. Many of these bold stylistic choices have been attributed to Lee's status as a more artistic, rather than stereotypically action-focused filmmaker. However, Hulk is far from the only comic book movie directed by someone with a very distinct style to face a polarized reception. Indeed, Tim Burton's Batman Returns shows that it wasn't even the first project to attempt such a bold and visionary approach.
Batman Returns is surprisingly similar to Hulk not just in how it used an iconic superhero, but also in how it was received by the general public. The Christmas-set Batman Returns is more favorably regarded today than it was during its contemporaneous reception, but Hulk has never had any noticeable modern reappraisal itself. While the two movies may seem incredibly distinct on paper, Hulk and Batman Returns both share stylistic, thematic and even plot similarities that make the comparison more than appropriate.
When Hulk hit theaters in the summer of 2003, it quickly became clear that despite bearing the Marvel logo, it was hardly a superhero film. While Hulk had plenty of the green behemoth battling the military and generally smashing, the emphasis of the movie was on the trauma of Bruce Banner's (Eric Bana) childhood. Even compared to Mark Ruffalo's ongoing MCU Hulk, Bana's version was, in a very true sense, Bruce's suppressed rage finally boiling to the surface, with Ang Lee deliberately making very bitter anger the most potent emotion to emerge.
Hulk's page-turning, comic book style scene transitions were completely new, while many of the big action scenes played more as fever dreams of blind fury, including the final showdown between Bruce and his father David Banner (Nick Nolte) in the form of the Hulk and the Absorbing Man. Hulk was ultimately a familial domestic violence story blown up to superhero proportions, which led to a very divided reception. This was not unlike what Batman Returns had experienced eleven years earlier, largely thanks to its similar themes of anger, abuse and retribution.
Like Hulk, Batman Returns was not only an extremely dark movie, but one that took its title character in very unexpected directions, with Batman Returns even having horror movie overtones. Family rejection and the scars deriving from it played a big role in Batman Returns, and like Hulk, its ending was far from an uplifting one. As would later happen with Hulk, Batman Returns' reception and box office performance led to its own franchise revamp with 1995's Batman Forever.
The thing about the divisiveness of both Batman Returns and Hulk during their initial runs is that both are easy to understand, especially in hindsight. Both films made by auteur directors, Batman Returns and Hulk were experimental movies on every level. Batman Returns was an exercise in bringing the villain, in this case, Danny DeVito's reimagined Penguin, to the forefront and placing the focus of the story on his rise and fall. Hulk was, by Ang Lee's own description, a Greek tragedy, and was predicated on lasting family trauma. Both films arrived when superhero movies were much less common, and were both going to be acquired tastes for many audiences.
Ang Lee's approach with Hulk certainly isn't for everyone, but his take on the character is certainly unique. Far more so than any interpretation of the Hulk before or after, Hulk isn't just submerged in anger, but the Hulk himself is perhaps the scariest version there's ever been. The Lou Ferrigno-led Incredible Hulk TV series and subsequent movies adapted the Hulk into a man-on-the-run tale, but made Bill Bixby's David Banner and Ferrigno's Hulk into heroes when the story called for it. The MCU Hulk movies, both in Edward Norton and Mark Ruffalo portrayals, were also far more enveloped in Marvel comic lore. This brought Bruce Banner into colorful, crowd-pleasing comic book adventures, along with making Ruffalo's version a member of the Avengers.
Hulk stripped all of that away, and zeroed in on the most primal aspects of the idea of the Hulk. Lee's film is all about the long-term effects of childhood trauma and suppressed anger. The end result is a very raw take on the Hulk, but that was also Lee's intention. Lee's film deconstructs what life would be like if turning into the Hulk had none of the upsides that Bixby, Norton, or Ruffalo's versions had.
As told by Lee, the story of Hulk reflects back the true harshness of a character that is anger personified even more than The Incredible Hulk later would. Some might say, and indeed did say, that Ang Lee took the fun out of the Hulk, but he simply presented him from a darker angle. With Hulk, Lee sought to get to the heart of what anger as the source of superpowers might mean, and in so doing portrayed in the Hulk in the most candid terms he's ever been given. This approach shared remarkable similarities with the complex, multifaceted villains of Burton's Batman Returns, once again highlighting the two movies' shared DNA.
The rise of the Multiverse as an increasingly dominant trend in superhero movies could be just what Hulk needs for its reputation to be re-evaluated. Following on the animated series What If...? and 2021's mega-hit Spider-Man: No Way Home, the Marvel Multiverse will continue expanding with Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. The movie is full of cameos, both confirmed in the case of Patrick Stewart's Professor Xavier and many others rumored. An Eric Bana/Bruce Banner return isn't necessarily impossible, though it seems unlikely with Bana's own disinterest in a Hulk return. Putting that aside, the idea of the Multiverse as a storytelling device also alleviates any one version of a character from the burden of being the main or definitive take. This could prove retroactively beneficial for many superhero properties, including Ang Lee's Hulk.
With the Hulk having becoming a staple character of the MCU, Hulk itself could be reframed as essentially a What If...?-style variant before the show even came to be. As just one Marvel Universe, Hulk is being unshackled from what it was tasked with doing back in 2003. With that understanding being progressively more laid out, Hulk could have the chance to be viewed through a new lens that it never really got. While it seems unlikely that Hulk will be crowned an outright misunderstood masterpiece decades after the fact, a re-examination by the growing expansion of Marvel's Multiverse of it could place Hulk in a whole new and potentially more favorably viewed context. The same argument could also be made for Batman Returns, considering the multiple cinematic revisions of the character, as well as DC's stated plans for its own ambitious multiverse.
Hulk might not have been the rapturously received summer blockbuster millions had expected. Still, time has been kind to it, while the advent of the superhero boom has given Hulk a more contextualized lens to be viewed through. Like Batman Returns, Hulk is also very specific in its portrayal of its hero, but with the age of the Multiverse for DC and Marvel, the two can more easily stand as one Batman and one Hulk among many.