It's hard to believe how badly Marvel has dropped the ball with The Hulk franchise. Prior to the original X-Men and Spider-Man films in the 2000s, The Hulk was arguably Marvel's most mainstream character. The outstanding 1970s series The Incredible Hulk helped cement the character in pop culture for decades. Naturally, when Marvel decided to create their own film studio, the Hulk was one of the first characters greenlit for a solo adventure. Unfortunately, 2008's Incredible Hulk was the last solo Hulk movie Marvel has produced, relegating Bruce Banner to a supporting character without a franchise to call his own.
Similar to Namor, The Hulk's film rights are tangled up at Universal, as the studio owns the distribution rights to the character. Consequently, a Hulk movie seemed like an impossibility for years. According to Comicbook.com, there's a rumor that Marvel is trying to set the stage for a Hulk movie based on the epic World War Hulk comic run.
A suspected Marvel production company is teasing a World War Hulk movie. My Cosmic Circus reports that Shadowstone Productions LLC is indeed working as Marvel Studios. Tracking working titles and trying to determine what they could be referring to is a well-worn practice among MCU obsessives. Sometimes there are character bits in there, and other times there are more outright allusions to glean. At any case, Shadowstone is a rare-Earth mineral in Marvel Comics. Now, why does that matter for World War Hulk? Well, that rock was used to craft the ship that brought Hulk back to his home planet to seek revenge against the Avengers who sent him away during Civil War.
She-Hulk has already established Hulk's son Skaar and teased a Red Hulk emergence. Couple that with the information we have that Harrison Ford is set to play General Thunderbolt Ross in Captain America: New World Order, and the picture becomes even clearer. It seems like Bruce Banner might be getting back to those savage times with even his nemesis The Leader being the primary antagonist of Cap 4. All the dots are lining up, but nothing official has been revealed by the company yet.
