The MCU's Bruce Banner: where does he go from here?

Maybe General Ross could fit into Cap 2 somehow, what with Rogers being (I assume) former Army and all...

 

Of course, if we're expected to accept that Norton and Ruffalo are the same person and that Howard and Cheadle are one and the same, then maybe all the different Stan Lees are intended to be entirely different people with absolutely no resemblance to one another.

 

Hugh Hefner and Larry King look nothing alike.

 

Hugh Hefner should appear as Stan Lee, just to mess with people's heads.

 

But it's more fun to try to link the various Stans and see how many of them can be connected. It would be cool if he were this guy who just kept running into superheroes wherever he went, kinda like the Cabbage Vendor in Avatar: The Last Airbender.

Actually, though, I do think it's more likely that Stan's MCU characters are different people. The one who shows up at galas attended by Tony Stark is presumably a fairly prominent society/media figure, though one that Tony keeps mistaking for other celebrities (unless you assume he really was playing Hef and Larry King, respectively, an interpretation that his wardrobe in those scenes would support). The one from TIH was evidently an ordinary homeowner in Milwaukee, while the one from Thor was a pickup-truck owner from Puente Antigua, and the one from The Avengers was a New Yorker who evidently had no prior experience with superheroes. The one from CA:TFA was, of course, about 70 years older than the others and can't have been the same fellow. Also, the scenes in IM2, Hulk, and Thor would've all come within a few days of each other, apparently, so it's unlikely that the same guy could've moved around that much in so short a time. So at most the two Stans in the IM films might be the same person, and the rest are all different. (But perhaps General Stan Lee from Cap was involved in an early cloning experiment and all the present-day Stans are his identical offspring!)

Now, as for Stan's other cameos, I like to think that all three cameos in the Raimi Spider-Man films are the same person. But we know his Fantastic Four characters are two different people, Willie Lumpkin and Stan Lee (unless Willie was pretending to be Stan Lee to crash the wedding). And his cameo in X-Men: The Last Stand took place decades before the events of X-Men, so those two Stans have to be different people. (Given the timing and the shared studio, though, the Stan in The Last Stand could conceivably be the same person young Matt Murdock stopped from walking into traffic in Daredevil.) The Ang Lee Hulk stands apart in its own continuity, and even if you did graft it onto one of the other non-MCU continuities, his role as a security guard at UC Berkeley is tough to reconcile with his other, mostly NY-based appearances. And his first ever movie cameo, in the TV movie The Trial of the Incredible Hulk in 1989, was in a dream sequence.

So I guess it's not as easy to link the various cameos as I hoped. The Spidey cameos are the only ones that can really fit together.

 

Can all of Bruce Campbell's Spider-Man cameos be the same guy?

 

^ Only if he's the Beyonder or some other godlike entity and can prevent Spidey from recognising him.

 

That would be a serious level of control.
Makes tantric look like a walk in the park if he could manage that trick.


As for Hulk, I do want another solo film where we have a more interactive character. I can handle varying degrees of intelligence but give me a Hulk who can have a conversation and be understood. Somewhere between Savage and Professor there has to be a happy point. They let Abomination speak plainly after all in TIH.

 

I agree. He should be more articulate. Lou Ferrigno actually did a pretty good job as the voice of the Hulk in the '90s animated series, so he could handle having more than two words to say. And performance-capture technology has reached the point where the lip synch could be convincing.

The original Hulk in the comics was a pretty articulate fellow with normal intelligence; he was just angry. It was at least a couple of years before he degenerated to "Hulk smash puny humans!" The version in Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes is much like that early comics version (as well as being permanently in Hulk form), and that's worked out pretty well.

 

Band name.[/Mr Laser Beam]

 

Stan Lee is playing the same guy. Each is from alternate timelines which are overlapping each other. I think the Department of Temporal Investigations will need to check this out Christopher!

 

Maybe I am way off, but to me the end of the movie suggested that he had been thoroughly in control of his transformations for quite a while before the opening of the film. This was the reason he was much more relaxed and confident throughout the movie. It was his "secret" as it gave him much more power to have everyone else think he could blow at any moment.

I can't remember the exact line, but it went something like--"I've got a secret; I'm always angry." and then he transforms at will.

The whole incident with him being out of control in the helicarrier was entirely due to Loki's magic, which is why all the characters were at each other's throats.

 

I don't think that's true. It's hardly Whedon's approach to gloss over character conflict as something artificially imposed; he prefers to bring it naturally out of the characters. Rather, Loki manipulated the situation in such a way that the naturally occurring tensions between the characters would come to a head, and once they reached their peak (as monitored through the spear), once the team was most fragmented emotionally, that's when he chose to strike. Bruce was unable to control the change at that point because the preceding several minutes' worth of events, first the big argument and then the attack, had created so much tension that it eventually overwhelmed his control. At least, that's how I read it.

 

Oh, absolutely. He's the Where's Wally?/ Forrest Gump of the Marvel Universe.

I like the clone suggestion best. Or a bunch of identical quintuplets or sextuplets (I've forgotten by now how many cameos there are).

We're back to the clone theory. Forget Spider-man and/ or Star Wars, this is the real clone saga.

 

And by the way, I do think it's possible that the three Bruce Campbell characters in the Spidey movies -- the fight emcee, the snooty usher, and the French waiter -- are the same guy bouncing from job to job, adopting different roles and personas as he moves up the career ladder. Sure, they don't recognize each other, but not everyone perfectly remembers faces they only briefly glimpsed (and the emcee didn't see Peter's face the first time). On the other hand, the waiter was much more friendly and accommodating than the usher, so either Bruce had a life-changing epiphany after being fired from the usher job for being too snooty, or they're long-lost identical triplets.

 

identical cousins. like all those Brian O'Halloran, Jeff Anderson, Jason Lee, Ben Affleck et. al. characters in the Kevin Smith movies.

 

He could just have been having a bad day during Spider-man 2.

 

How the heck did that American usher end up being more snooty than that French maître d'? Talk about playing against type!

 

^ Or a perceptive blow against sterotypes! As a relatively frequent visitor to France, I've always thought that their waiters are no worse than those in any other country.

 

I would suggest that Stan Lee is God, but that would leave John Williams out of a job.

Stan Lee can be Q.