AV zombie

It looks like Marvel still isn’t sure how to develop The Hulk for the big-screen, and there seems no consensus on the development of an Avengers franchise. While The Incredible Hulk didn’t exactly flop, it looks like the jury is still out on future projects.
Talking on MTV, star Edward Norton said: “The minds of Marvel are sometimes opaque. I won’t say obtuse, but I don’t have any idea what they want to do.”

When When asked if he’s had discussions about being involved as Ol’ Greenskin in the planned movie debut of The Avengers, tentatively scheduled for 2011, he added: “They’ve got this notion of collecting the Marvel characters. Who knows where they’ll go?”

Iron Man was the surprise hit of 2008, but director Jon Favreau is also less than clear how the Avengers fit into his plans for what will now be a trilogy of Shellhead movies, the sequel of which is slated for 2010. Speaking about Robert Downey Jr’s appearance at the close of The Incredible Hulk, he says “Where does that fit in the continuum? I don’t want to just ignore it. I guess you could do what Marvel does and say it’s an alternate universe. They’ve gotten away with it for a couple of decades. But how do you make it all work within that world?  I think Hulk was successful in keeping in a tone that did not seem inconsistent with our film.”

Favreau adds that to make an Avengers movie work, you have to somehow convince viewers not only to accept futuristic technology – and easy sell in Iron Man – but also mythology, with Thor, and a frozen hero in the shape of Captain America: “We were very restrained with how we used our superhero-ism in our movie and we did that by keeping it all tech-based. OK, I could maybe buy that with the super soldier thing, but how do you make that all feel of the same world that our movie does? That’s going to be the challenge moving forward.”