MOVIE URBAN LEGEND: The Hulk ended up not being grey during Avengers: Age of Ultron because it was seen as too confusing of a connection to the comic book grey Hulk.
One of the most striking sequence (pun unintended) in Avengers: Age of Ultron was when the Scarlet Witch used her powers to, in effect, entrance the Hulk…
She then sent the Hulk on a savage rampage. Iron Man had to break out the Hulkbuster armor to stop him…
It’s an epic battle…
Anyhow, as it turned out, the Hulk was actually originally going to be GREY in the sequence, as the Scarlet Witch’s spell was going to not only make him go savage, but it would also even show him go savage that he essentially mutated into the grey Hulk form.
This obviously didn’t happen in the movie. Why not?
As it turned out, it really had a lot to do with Peter David’s Incredible Hulk, which prominently featured the Grey Hulk early on, first as part of a team of former “Hulkbusters” on the run to decommission a bunch of missing Gamma Bombs…
and later, after seemingly dying in a Gamma Bomb explosion, the Grey Hulk showed up as a mob enforcer in Las Vegas…
(Also, obviously, the Hulk was initially grey when Jack Kirby and Stan Lee invented him….
)
So, yeah, the Grey Hulk had a strong comic book history. That appears to be why the idea was dropped from the final cut of the film.
The always awesome Rob Keyes interviewed the visual effects supervisor for the film, Christopher Townsend, for Screen Rant about why the change was dropped and he explained:
We tried a few shots in the film with that sort of much grayer version. And then we’re thinking, “Will people confuse this with the gray Hulk from the comics? And is that a good thing or a bad thing?” Eventually, I think we backed off a little bit of that and made him greener so that…we didn’t want to confuse people in creating a new character, per se, in that way. So we ultimately backed off. But we had gone pretty extreme in the looks for him.
I guess there’s always the chance that audiences really would think that it was a whole other character. It still sounds like it would have been pretty cool, though!
The legend is…
STATUS: True
Thanks to Rob Keyes and Christopher Townsend for the information!
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