...we haven't established anything though yet? Who's to say we can't establish magic whilst we're literally within the phases of establishing our first few movies?
Conservation of detail. It's because we haven't established anything that we can't do it as well. If we have to have the movie spend time establishing both the Hulk stuff and magic then both aspects will be worse off for it.
Like Iron Man established literally just Iron Man and nothing else. Let's try not to bite off more than we can chew in literally the second movie we are making. We've got to build the foundation now because if that's not solid everything else fails. Trying to branch out and do too much fundamentally weakens the foundation we're laying for the character and for the future of the cinematic universe.
Edit: And this isn't even getting into that Perlmutter is likely going to hate a movie with a mostly female POV, a female main antagonist and no very marketable antagonist name to slap on to get people excited for the film.
Ang Lee already did it in his movie. There's a reason why I joke about how the villain of the film is Bruce's evil cloud dad. I'd rather wait and give it some breathing room as we reestablish what Hulk is than try to do it again right on the heels of Ang Lee's trainwreck.
So I think this is effectively Umar in name only because as of right now it seems to lack almost every trait that makes her recognizably Umar. She's not magic, she's not immortal, she lacks superhuman strength, she lacks the motivation involving issues with her brother, she appears to be perfectly human and I imagine she'd lack the costume. Yes she's doing something somewhat adjacent to what was done in the comics (when she more or less raped the Hulk) but it's not something I think is integral to her character and it seems a shame to have the role of Umar, a huge Dr. Strange villain, be reduced to a one off villain for Hulk to fight.
She is doing magic. She is using magical hypnosis. She is presented as a witch doctor/hypnotist in her early scenes, which is a guise she sheds to reveal herself in the third act. She is immortal (why are you assuming this?), she lacks superhuman strength on par with the Hulk but she's at peak human strength, "she lacks the motivation involving issues with her brother"--where are you getting this idea that she doesn't have issues with her brother? She appears to be human, while in her guise as a human, and assumes her costume in her final appearance.
Now as for why I think the movie is going too fast I have to clarify what I was saying. I think that the script you are pitching is internally fine. I think it works as an isolated self-contained story. I do not think it works in the greater whole of the hypothetical cinematic universe. I think it's trying to set up too much future plot threads to use in future movies for the second movie in a series when people have no idea of even the concept of a cinematic universe.
Here are some examples of things it tries to set up in a way that just feels too fast for the film
Nadia's literal list of Hulk antagonists who apparently are all existing off-screen
Hulk hunting organizations
Apparently magic comes into the third act of the movie when it's literally never been seen before this point
Apparently Umar is setting up for Dr. Strange
It's clearly setting up She-Hulk
Emil and Nadia Blonsky are being set up to be a future antagonist
The Green Scar when regular Hulk is all people really know at this point and we have to reestablish stuff from the Ang Lee film
Like this is a movie that feels like it is assuming that the audience is going to accept and care about all of these things simply because we do now. It feels too fast for the second movie we are making to be attempting to set up at least three different films and introduce too many new elements all at once when the audience isn't even invested in a wider Marvel universe.
Sure. There are some valid criticisms here that we can go through; Nadia's list of internal antagonists is literally her saying names that will have meaning to comic fans, a way of throwing a bone, but it's absolutely removable/replacable. It's just dialogue to pace the scene. The existence of "hulk-hunting organizations" -- I don't think that this is a stretch, and it follows very quickly from the Hulk being hunted in the first place. Magic is seen throughout the movie (the hypnosis, the hallucinations becoming more and more tangible and being fought off) and it is set up through the story that the bartender tells. The bartender telling the story is setting up the Green Scar, introducing the concept, and it's building off of the Ang Lee film notes; at no point do we say "no this Hulk has a different origin," it is just elaborating that there is more to the origin than simple gamma radiation.
Umar is a coherent villain by herself. She gives a hook to Dr. Strange/Dormammu in a post-credit stinger. This is standard practice in Marvel films, and I don't know why you'd consider it rushing. It sets up for Dormammu to be used down the line, it doesn't demand an immediate follow-up. Emil and Nadia are both being set up to be future antagonists, but they're also the antagonists in this movie, they just don't get killed off during it.
Yeah, it does set up She-Hulk, but the character of Jen works without reference to the idea of She-Hulk.
As cool as this pitch is in general (and it is very cool), I think at this juncture adding Umar is a really, really bad idea. Remember, the MCU is just getting started! We're not at the point yet where we're popular and profitable enough that we can introduce any character we please, let alone just say "magic exists now, deal with it" and have casual fans accept that. (Especially not in a Hulk movie, which is notably likelier than Iron Man to draw in viewers who haven't read the comics.)
I strongly disagree here. This is the second movie in the cinematic universe. There is no reason that people will come into this movie and say "oh magic doesn't exist." The pitch establishes magic over the course of three acts (act 1 introduces magic through the bartender's story, introducing the concept and directly combating the idea that the Hulk is just a creature of science; act 2 focuses heavily on magic, through the hypnosis of Bruce and the drawing of the Hulk to the front of his mind; act 3 has Umar making nightmares and hallucinations manifest into the world, the hallucinations having been a major plot point throughout the entire movie, as well as empowering herself).
[...]
That being said, I am clearly on the minority here, and I won't continue this fight if y'all are locked in with other ideas.
[x] Plan: For Future Submariners
-[x] [Pseudo-Sequel?] Follow the previous deal; start the movie with Bruce Banner already on the run.
-[x] [Director] Keep Louis Leterrier, you're sure you can come to a compromise somewhere.
She is doing magic. She is using magical hypnosis. She is presented as a witch doctor/hypnotist in her early scenes, which is a guise she sheds to reveal herself in the third act. She is immortal (why are you assuming this?), she lacks superhuman strength on par with the Hulk but she's at peak human strength, "she lacks the motivation involving issues with her brother"--where are you getting this idea that she doesn't have issues with her brother? She appears to be human, while in her guise as a human, and assumes her costume in her final appearance.
The hypnosis didn't come off to me as magic. It was not inherently clear by the script itself that magic was involved.
That being said if in the third act she gains her costume, immortality, full blown powers and is revealed to have issues with her brother then yes she is no longer Umar in name only. However she then becomes a bad antagonist because literally almost everything about her gets revealed in the last third of the movie. You've got effectively two different characters wearing the same skin and it feels disjointed as a twist since it doesn't feel like there's anything near enough foreshadowing that the audience could pick up on this twist at all and kind of feels cheap and unearned.
Everything she does in the third act appears to be radically distinct from what she did in the entire rest of the movie.
I strongly disagree here. This is the second movie in the cinematic universe. There is no reason that people will come into this movie and say "oh magic doesn't exist."
There is a reason for the average movie goer to think "the Hulk doesn't normally fight magic users" and to believe they are correct. Pop culture up until this point doesn't normally have the Hulk fight magic users. Additionally people have no idea what a cinematic universe even is at this point. Like it seems obvious to us now but back then it was completely and utterly mindblowing that all these films were interconnected.
Like by this logic we could have the Hulk battle aliens or the Thing or his future self and they are all as valid. We need to walk before we can run and people need to be eased into comic book movies before they can accept more of the convoluted crossover stuff.
This is standard practice in Marvel films now. Back then a film set up it's own hero, one antagonist, some supporting cast and nothing else save for hinting at the next movie with a post credits scene. Iron Man set up just Iron Man, Thor set up just Thor, Captain America set up just Captain America and Hulk set up just Hulk. I don't believe we should stick to the OTL one to one but we should at least pay attention to why they made the decisions they did to try and account for the environment at the time. It feels like rushing because this script feels like it's trying to be a marvel movie written for now as opposed to a marvel movie written for back then when cinematic universes weren't even a thing in any meaningful capacity even in people's heads.
Edit: The movie is structurally sound in a vacuum. Where it's not sound is where it is placed in the production pipeline since it lacks any of the cushioning of "it's a cinematic movie universe" and people are going into it full well expecting a pure classic hulk movie. I would have no problems with this if it were not literally the second movie and placed in a time where people didn't even really imagine the concept of cinematic universes.
[X] Plan: Make a Good Movie
-[x] [Pseudo-Sequel?] Ignore the previous deal; start the movie with the origins of Hulk, again.
-[x] [Director] Dismiss Louis Leterrier, you have another Director to take his place.
--[x] Having a reputation for action and Thriller, D. J. Caruso has a solid appreciation for Comic Book stories. He can bring some actors who work with him as well.
You know, we keep assuming that if we do the Leader then he has to get his powers from the same accident that creates the Hulk, but there's no reason that necessarily has to be the case.
Pitch: Samuel Sterns is a scientist and former colleague of Bruce Banner, who is working with Thunderbolt Ross on a device to remove the radiation from Banner's body, thereby neutralizing the Hulk. Sterns, however, is obsessed with the potential of gamma mutation. He claims he wants to "guide humanity's evolution" and improve lives in so doing, but his true motivation is an inferiority complex driven by envy of Banner.
Thus, he secretly designs the device to do the exact opposite of what it claims it will do, replicating the burst of gamma radiation that gave Bruce Banner his Hulk form. Sterns, however, channels the burst into his brain matter, causing a massive increase in intellect.
Sterns pretends he's still working for Ross (possibly until his famous expanded cranium gives him away as a gamma mutant himself). Under this guise, he constructs a bomb that will irradiate everyone in a vast radius and supposedly give them the "gift" he and Banner have received. But in actuality, he's just turning them into mindless beasts under his control.
I don't have a full plot pitch here—just the Leader, his motivation, and his plan—but I think it might work decently well for our purposes.
Edit: also, do the two plans we're voting on have anything to do with plot pitches or is it just the director and the Universal deal?
That being said if in the third act she gains her costume, immortality, full blown powers and is revealed to have issues with her brother then yes she is no longer Umar in name only. However she then becomes a bad antagonist because literally almost everything about her gets revealed in the last third of the movie. You've got effectively two different characters wearing the same skin and it feels disjointed as a twist since it doesn't feel like there's anything near enough foreshadowing that the audience could pick up on this twist at all and kind of feels cheap and unearned.
...What? Where is your insistence on her immortality coming from?
She's immortal throughout the whole movie. Nobody tries to kill her in the other acts, so it doesn't come up. Her having issues with her brother isn't something that's going to get addressed directly, because it doesn't need to be, but in the planned stinger it'd allude to her and Dormammu's sibling rivalry and power struggles.
Her "inconsistent acts" -- after she fails to control the Hulk, she starts using her magic in other ways. Not sure where the inconsistency is.
There is a reason for the average movie goer to think "the Hulk doesn't normally fight magic users" and to believe they are correct. Pop culture up until this point doesn't normally have the Hulk fight magic users. Additionally people have no idea what a cinematic universe even is at this point. Like it seems obvious to us now but back then it was completely and utterly mindblowing that all these films were interconnected.
Like by this logic we could have the Hulk battle aliens or the Thing or his future self and they are all as valid. We need to walk before we can run and people need to be eased into comic book movies before they can accept more of the convoluted crossover stuff.
The bolded is absolutely correct and I am glad that you've said it. Cinematic universes don't yet exist, so we should be tackling the magic issue on the individual movie level. The movie introduces magic over the course of three acts. The Hulk is explained as having a mixed magic-science origin that plays off his Ang Lee origin, while still iterating differently and allowing us to work into other areas.
"The Hulk doesn't normally fight magic users" -- so, does the public read Hulk comics and know his usual villains, or does the public not read Hulk comics and not know anything about Hulk's magical origin bends? This is a moot point. The public wants a good movie, they don't need the antagonist to be a Hulk knock-off, they don't have a concept that this movie is a crossover. They see "oh, powerful witch is trying to mind-control the Hulk as a weapon in her power struggles, that makes sense" because people attempting to manipulate or control the Hulk against his team is huge in Hulks appearances in TV shows.
...And yes, we could have Hulk battle aliens, or the Thing, or his future self, if we developed that throughout the entire movie and established a narrative around it. Hulk fighting aliens is one of his most iconic stories, I think it'd -probably- do well. Hulk fighting The Thing is a classic, but The Thing is part of a greater organization that we'd have to introduce; as opposed to Umar, who is a leader on her own right and has worked multiple times as an independent villain in the comics. The Hulk fighting against his future self, well, Maestro is a really cool villain and if you had a script that made him showing up coherent, I'd love to see him utilized early on.
You are reading into these characters and stating "this is just set up for future movies." No. They are hooks that we can use if we want, but nothing in the movie is demanding a sequel, nothing is demanding further exploration. It is the story of a cousin bringing her cousin back from the brink of madness and alcoholism, while others around him try to manipulate his mental illness to fill their own advantages and needs. The Blonskys are secret agents, and if we want to explore them as Abomination later on, we could, but there's nothing saying "these characters need to be a future! presence!"
It sets up for Dr. Strange because it introduces magic, and it has a shared enemy between Dr. Strange and Hulk present in it. Counting that as "this is another thread that we have to spend time developing" is odd, because we never mention Dr. Strange at all, we never allude to his presence, we just have concepts involved that are also involved in his mythos.
Edit: The movie is structurally sound in a vacuum. Where it's not sound is where it is placed in the production pipeline since it lacks any of the cushioning of "it's a cinematic movie universe" and people are going into it full well expecting a pure classic hulk movie. I would have no problems with this if it were not literally the second movie and placed in a time where people didn't even really imagine the concept of cinematic universes.
These statements are not valid arguments. The movie is structurally sound in a vacuum, yes, it doesn't rely on any other movie. It tells a self-contained story that we can go back to later, but there's not a part of it that we have to go back to. The Hulk being magic is a self-contained part of the Hulk, not some link to another part of the universe.
People aren't expecting anything of it yet. We haven't started the marketing of the movie. We haven't filmed any footage to make any trailers. People will expect the movie to be what we advertise it to be.
I don't think this is accurate. It probably would be if this were Iron Man, Captain America, or Black Widow, for example, but it's not. The Hulk was one of the few superheroes who was a household name before the MCU existed.
As such, we can reasonably expect most people who are interested in watching a Hulk movie to know something along the lines of "Bruce Banner is a nerdy scientist who was hit with gamma radiation and transforms into a giant green beast when he gets angry". That means that people will go into the movie willing to suspend their disbelief for weird feats of comic book super-science and radiation doing stuff it doesn't do in real life—but not for sorcerers and spells.
Also, regardless of fan expectations, I feel that the introduction of magic to the MCU should be its own event, a dramatic and spectacular reveal that changes everything people thought they knew about the film's universe, not crammed in to spice up a movie about science gone awry. We should wait for a tonally and thematically appropriate film (such as Thor) in order to make the addition.
It's all connected in some way. The Director will influence the Pitches (which will be voted for in the next update), some Directors will have better synergy with some pitches and vice versa.
As for the Universal deal, well, if we remove the complications and focus on how it affects the movie narratively, then choosing to follow through with it makes it so that the story begins with Banner already on the run and his backstory already told.
...What? Where is your insistence on her immortality coming from?
She's immortal throughout the whole movie. Nobody tries to kill her in the other acts, so it doesn't come up. Her having issues with her brother isn't something that's going to get addressed directly, because it doesn't need to be, but in the planned stinger it'd allude to her and Dormammu's sibling rivalry and power struggles.
Her "inconsistent acts" -- after she fails to control the Hulk, she starts using her magic in other ways. Not sure where the inconsistency is.
I'm not quite sure what you think the insistence on immortality is. I do believe that it's a critical part of Umar's character to be immortal but I think we're starting to talk past each other.
Additionally the issue is as follows. In the first two acts of the movie Umar is presented as a maybe mystical hypnotist who's perfectly human. In the last third everything she did beforehand is no longer being used and she's portrayed completely differently and completely distinct from how she was before. The problem is that the Umar of the third act is not sufficiently set up for and feels out of nowhere unless you're familiar with the character already (which people won't be).
The bolded is absolutely correct and I am glad that you've said it. Cinematic universes don't yet exist, so we should be tackling the magic issue on the individual movie level. The movie introduces magic over the course of three acts. The Hulk is explained as having a mixed magic-science origin that plays off his Ang Lee origin, while still iterating differently and allowing us to work into other areas.
I will argue that it doesn't sufficiently establish both the Hulk and the magic stuff at the same time and things like the nightmare climax, are not sufficiently established at all. The movie introduces one type of magic in the first two acts, a separate type of magic in the third act and makes the Hulk origin story people are not super familiar with into another distinct type of magic.
We should have magic established in a movie just for magic, but even then magic needs to have limitations and it's capabilities need to be sufficiently established in order for it to not violate suspension of disbelief. We should also have how the Hulk works sufficiently established in its own right and unless we want to lean incredibly super hard on the Ang Lee film (which is a mistake) the film doesn't do that.
"The Hulk doesn't normally fight magic users" -- so, does the public read Hulk comics and know his usual villains, or does the public not read Hulk comics and not know anything about Hulk's magical origin bends? This is a moot point. The public wants a good movie, they don't need the antagonist to be a Hulk knock-off, they don't have a concept that this movie is a crossover. They see "oh, powerful witch is trying to mind-control the Hulk as a weapon in her power struggles, that makes sense" because people attempting to manipulate or control the Hulk against his team is huge in Hulks appearances in TV shows.
You are right in that I did not articulate myself well at all.
The average person does not know anything about Hulk's magical origins and they do know of his more general traits if vastly over simplified. As such the people most likely to see a Hulk film, people who are interested in the character, likely know of the Hulk as a gamma mutant who fights other science based foes but doesn't know the nuance of the magical elements that would be introduced. The core audience has just enough knowledge of the character to have expectations but not enough to have fully accurate ones.
For comparison it's like if someone did a magic Spider-Man movie in a new cinematic universe. Spider-Man does have a mystical element to his power and he does sometimes fight magical multiverse hopping vampires. However the general audience does not know that and has a different expectation out of what Spiderman is and does. Because a movie needs to establish it's own rules and guidelines how Spidey's powers need to work but the core audience of the film is coming in with things they are more or less likely to suspend their disbelief for.
These statements are not valid arguments. The movie is structurally sound in a vacuum, yes, it doesn't rely on any other movie. It tells a self-contained story that we can go back to later, but there's not a part of it that we have to go back to. The Hulk being magic is a self-contained part of the Hulk, not some link to another part of the universe.
People aren't expecting anything of it yet. We haven't started the marketing of the movie. We haven't filmed any footage to make any trailers. People will expect the movie to be what we advertise it to be.
You're correct that the argument above was not well phrased. Allow me to reiterate.
This is a movie that is self-contained if it has a different movie backing it up for certain elements (which it does) but at the same time has just enough expectations built around it that what people are and aren't willing to suspend their disbelief for doesn't work cleanly. Hulk is just known enough that he operates in a space where there is an expectation for him to deal with certain types of things even if that isn't wholly accurate.
People will not always come into a film with expectations solely from the advertising and the Hulk is definitely going to have just enough expectations that people will only suspend disbelief on some things and not enough familiarity that we can afford to not explain certain elements.
Edit: I think it is a more or less good Hulk story but not one that works for the context it's placed in. I have no issue with it being placed at a later point in time but I don't want it placed where it is.
I know I'm late to the party, but I haven't seen any real discussions about the directors.
Why C. J. Caruso? Some brief googling gives me the impression that Matt Reeves is the most solid pick out of the three presented. He hasn't accomplished much by this point in time, Cloverfield being the project that he's working on, but his work on the Apes trilogy shows he has potential. Whereas there's nothing like that for the rest. All that I saw that had Caruso's name on were pretty bad movies. Heck, it made me want a quest about directing a Lorien Legecies series.
But, yeah.
Would it just be simpler to keep Louis, stick to the deal, and try to do what we can to make it quality? Doing our best when it comes to casting, and praying to the dice gods for the Production rolls? Then, if things go well, the deal for Hulk and Namor is as easy as it can get?
Would it just be simpler to keep Louis, stick to the deal, and try to do what we can to make it quality? Doing our best when it comes to casting, and praying to the dice gods for the Production rolls? Then, if things go well, the deal for Hulk and Namor is as easy as it can get?
Also, keeping the previous movie in the continuity would be more of a asset storywise than a liability: the search for Banner would be a easy plot-driving element, and the fatalities incurred in that search would lead nicely into a desperate Ross leaning onto metahumans to finally subdue Hulk. The Amazon is a nice setting too, and a great contrast to the mechanical surroundings in Iron Man.
That last part is important: as successful as the MCU formula might be, each film having at the very least a somewhat different basis would be nice.
Per the preference expressed by the thread for a different villain than Umar, this version of the pitch now uses Karla Sofen/Moonstone. I think it leads to a less compelling finale than the original planned finale, but it is what it is. I may or may not do more revision work on it later on, but I'm leaning towards this being the final version of the pitch I work on. The end of the movie could be fleshed out to give more time for falling action and tie up some of the movie's loose ends, and should be if the pitch is utilized, but I don't currently have the energy to write potential scenes for that out. There are a variety of stingers that I think would work well with this; Nick Fury or another figure intervening and preventing those involved from going to any trial, another figure collecting the Moonstone as an artifact of power, or the Blonskys being bailed out and brought in to work with another group based on their experiences against the Hulk.
The appearance of the "Fear-Hulk" is w.e; Red-Sofen could also simply control the waves of shadow-beasts and hallucinated monsters. Really, it depends on how we want the scene choreographed and what the budget for CGI/Special Effects in that part is. The Blonskys might also benefit from a better defeat, but I enjoy the idea of human-level threats being swatted off by the Hulk as if they were bugs.
Genre: Psychological horror, thriller, action
Synopsis: Bruce Banner is a man on the run from the demons of his past, weaving in and out of towns on the edge of the Amazon. Overwhelmed by his own fears and anxieties, he never stays too long in one place, fearing the green monster that hunts him and the holes in his memories. He is tailed throughout the jungle by forces seeking to use the green scar to their own advantage (ex-KGB-turn-international secret agents Emil and Nadia Blonsky and the powerful hypnotist Sofen), while his cousin, Jennifer Walters, wades through the jungle in hopes of bringing her family back from the brink of madness.
Cast: Dr. Bruce Banner (The Hulk), Jennifer Walters, David Banner Hallucinations, Dr. Karla Sofen/Dr. Carla Sofia (Dr. Moonstone), Emil Blonsky & Nadia Blonsky (Russians, mid 30s), Wise bartender (50s, Brazilian man, "wise beyond his years" look), Brazilian paramedic (mid-20s, Brazilian woman), Brazilian extras, Hallucination extras
In a rural area of Jutaí (Amazonas, Brazil), an untidy Bruce Banner stumbles from the back table of a rundown bar to the front. His clothes are torn at the shoulders and at the knees, and bruises wrap up and down the sides of his body. He nearly collapses onto the bar, interrupting the conversation of some locals in the process, and buries his head in his hands. Blood is crusted beneath his fingernails.
One of the locals he interrupted puts her hand on his shoulder, asking if he's okay. The room is getting louder around Bruce, but he can't hear anything. He stares at the woman blankly, with the camera clearly showing his bloodshot eyes and the paleness of his face. His heart is thumping. The woman shakes him again and the bartender gets closer, and all of a sudden, he's hearing again. She's saying she's a paramedic and offering him help. The room is loud. The music, a Brazilian dance-beat, is thumping along with his heart. Bruce tries to stand up again, and this time the angle shows his bruises better; stitches can be seen up and down the sides of his body, marked over bruises turned green in color.
The woman beside him gasps as she sees the wounds down his side. The bartender waves a hand in front of Bruce's face, while Bruce shudders and tries to cover his ears from the blasting music. The bar's bouncers, two local men, come forward and grab Bruce's shoulders, ready to drag him out of the bar. They drag him off the stool. Bruce falls over, hitting the ground hard. The stitches on his side rip open again, and the border-of-consciousness Bruce goes through a painful transformation on the bar's floor. At first, the bouncers are ready to ignore it, and try to drag him out towards the door; but soon enough the Hulk is rising up from the ground.
A fight/flight breaks out as the bar's denizens scatter. One bouncer is dumb enough to try and fight the rising Hulk. Visibility of the fight is blurred in places. With the beat of the music, the Hulk's vision is fading in and out. There are holes in his memories, so there should be holes in how the fight has been presented, following the rhythm of the song being played.
In the end, only the woman who put her hand on his shoulder at the beginning remains in the bar, too terrified to try and get out past the Hulk. The green monster stares at her, and as realization dawns on its face, the Hulk slowly turns back to Bruce and falls down to his knees. Bruce looks on at her, his eyes still those of the Hulk but now colored with desperation, and the terrified woman runs.
Fear the Hulk.
Jennifer Walters pulls off her motorcycle helmet and steps into the mud in Jutaí. She unfolds a map of the Amazonas region, marked off with green Xs and newspaper clippings where the Mapinguari (the Brazilian Bigfoot legend) has been spotted in towns. Jutaí, the town she's arrived in, has the most markings by far. Walters makes her way to the bar of the opening sequence and finds it closed down; the windows have been boarded up to cover clear breaks in the glass. Still, there's light on inside the building, so she knocks on the door. The door rattles with the knocks, enough that it's clear it could easily be broken down or had already been broken down, but otherwise there's no response. She knocks on the door again and the light inside flickers off.
With one final and harder knock, the door swings open. The bartender of that night, now with his arm wrapped in a sling, looks over at Jennifer and spits. Haven't you Americans demanded enough by now? Jennifer is visibly taken aback by his anger, but the injured man waves her into the broken bar anyway. The devastation inside is much, much worse than what the opening had portrayed. Tables are broken. Shattered glass has been swept into piles throughout the room, and it glints with blood still stained on the glass.
Walters approaches with politeness, asking what the bartender remembered of what happened here. He's irritated by it. He's already talked to enough agents of the U.S. government, and he's already got his marks on file. If she wants to "piss around" with more American bull about gamma-radiation and super-soldiers, she should go find that "prick of an agent Blonsky" and nod off about it there. No, he's tired of it. There's something in his anger that makes it clear he has more he wants to say, so Walters eggs him on to find out what he believes really happened. He starts talking.
The Americans call it "science gone wrong," a modern Frankenstein, an indomitable Hulk, hah. The idiots around here call it the Mapinguari, but all they know of the old lore is the piss that's put in movies. He's seen it before that night, long ago in his youth, and he knows its name. The Green Scar. A creature from the Savage Land, who wanders among the living, cursed forever by the sins of his forefathers—While the old bartender narrates, the focus shifts from his bar to Banner, now stumbling alone through the Amazon Rainforest with a large stick as support, with new wounds visible across his body poorly mended.
The bartender narrates on the Green Scar seeing enemies in every shadow, as Banner clings to trees for support and inches his way past hunting snakes. The Green Scar clings to animals for companionship, for it trusts itself not with the kinship of humans; Banner falls over a twig and drops to his knees again, coming face to face with a large basilisk-lizard. But even those animals the Green Scar clings to know its true nature, and flee from the horror it brings on the world around it.
The bartender's narration matching with Bruce's action continues for a while. Bruce sees more than just animals lurking in the shadows of the underbrush. He sees images of the Hulk lurking behind the trees. He sees memories scattered through the wood; the Hulk hurting people, his father screaming and his mother in fights, the lights of government research facilities and more. Those memories terrify him more than any of the horrors of the rainforest. He drinks from his flask as he makes his way through the jungle, to calm his nerves and his anxieties, but the demons he sees grow larger with each drink. It is implied to be alcohol. He refocuses himself on a card in his hand, a set of coordinates and a signature from Dr. Sofen.
Bruce progressively journeys through a section of the Amazon Rainforest, finally making his way out of the woods and into another small Amazonas town. There, he hopes to eat as a human (if he was too close to starving, the Hulk would force itself out and feed on whatever it could take, be it raw meat or etc.). Bruce recognizes a woman in the town.
The focus returns to the bartender finishing his long speech on the horrors of the "Green Scar" with a note on family and loved ones. It's clear he has some personal experience with it as he speaks on the wicked curse of seeing someone you love so afflicted. He warns Walters to stay away from the creature, and to abandon whatever plan her infernal government has for him; she reveals she isn't working with an organization to track the Hulk, and that she's his cousin, tracking him down to find help.
On that dramatized reveal, the Act ends. The focus comes back to Bruce.
Bruce makes his way over to the woman he recognized, and she's shocked to see he's made it. She scolds him for being "late," which Bruce tries to laugh off. Bruce embraces her, and it's awkward. She's revealed to be Dr. Karla Sofen, an old colleague of his and a native Brazilian, whose been working with Bruce to create a cure for his condition. Bruce clings on to her for support and stability in his ruined life, but Dr. Sofen does not do the same. There is something malevolent about Dr. Sofen from the start, but in this initial scene, it should be played off as a sort of anxiety or discomfort rather than true malice towards Bruce.
Sofen and Bruce make their way to Sofen's makeshift lab (really, a run-down shack) and settle down. Bruce drinks again from his flask to calm his nerve and his rising heart-beat, which Sofen wholeheartedly supports, suggesting that "the drink" keeps the Beast inside tamed. Bruce is hesitant at that statement, seeing bits of his fight in the bar in the shadows of the shack, but he doesn't outwardly confront her on it. Sofen refills Bruce's flask with mysterious liquids and provides food for Bruce, but it's closer to scraps than it is to an actual meal; she jokes that the food is the only thing that keeps him coming for his treatments.
Bruce sits while Sofen shackles him into his chair. She asks him if he's been having any negative side-effects from his treatments; Bruce stares forward and says that there's nothing new. Just the visions. He's been seeing his cousin more often these past days, and hopes it's a sign. Dr. Sofen recommends he doesn't get his hopes up. They choose Brazil for a reason, to get him away from all of the reminders of the outside world, and a hesitant Bruce agrees with her.
The lights inside Sofen's shack flicker, and come back stronger, giving Bruce hallucinations of the long hallways of the medical facility where the gamma-radiation experiments took place. His father lurks in the distance on the edge of the hallway, slamming the door shut on a young Walters family.
Sofen draws samples from Bruce's blood. Where her needle pricks his skin, his flesh immediately ripples out in green. She puts the samples to the side of her lab; her collection of blood samples and other materials looks closer to the work of a mad scientist or a witch than the collection of an actual doctor. From her collected materials, she pulls forth a black-bound tome, a silvered mirror and a brilliant diamond.
Sofen sits down across from Bruce, setting the book on the table between them and opening it. Impressive and colorful drawings are scattered across the pages, depicting green scars through the world and savage creatures of foreign lands. The book is more of a prop than an actual point of focus, however.
Sofen places the silvered mirror between the two of them. It is on a sort of dolly, staying upright on its own. She instructs Bruce to look in the mirror, and tell her if he sees anything unusual in it. Bruce, already staring into the mirror, sees himself in the glass; but behind him, down the hallucinatory lanes of that old medical facility, he sees shadows lurking. His father. His mother, limping. And the green monster, lurking, inching closer and closer to him.
Sofen taps the mirror's back, and it spins. There's an arcane "pinging" noise when the mirror spins that dilates Bruce's eyes. While the mirrors spin, Sofen's eyes and her diamond glow gently with the magic power they're channeling to the mirror. The silvered etchings around the mirror's edge glow as well, just as faintly.
When the mirror again faces Bruce, the images in it are different; he sees his father closer now, lurking, a bottle lifted to his lips. Bruce's eyes are more bloodshot now, and the Hulk is closer to him in the shadows. Anxiety is starting to take over in the visions and in reality, as Bruce begins to dig his nails into the wood of the chair. Blood gathers beneath his nails. Sofen insists that he calm down as she spins the mirror again; it is alright to let it all out. This is a safe space for him. She is a trained hypnotist, and she knows what is best for Mr. Banner.
Bruce, in a partial trance, repeats after her. The mirror spins again, and again, and the trance grows. The Hulk grows closer and closer in the reflection, until he has overtaken Bruce inside of it; no longer does Bruce see himself in the mirror, only the Hulk, hungry, ready, waiting to be let out of the mirror and into the world of the living once more.
Sofen stops spinning the mirror as the entranced and drunk Banner stares on into the mirror, a green shade taking over her eyes. She monologues, speculating on how many more sessions it will take before "the final cure sets in;" the entranced Banner mumbles on after her, repeating her mention of a "final cure" in a tone somewhere between his and the Hulk's. She collects her artifacts from the shack and departs, leaving Bruce to sit alone inside the room. The scene fades with Banner reeling, still entranced and watching as The Hulk takes over within his mind.
Days later, following a lead from the bartender, Jen tracks down Nadia Blonsky and Emil Blonsky to another rural area of the Jutaí region. She gets off her motorcycle and steps into the deep mud with a familiar groan. She's able to track down Nadia and Emil quickly after some talk with local towns people; one of them is the woman from the credits-intro scene, who tried to help Banner as he was injured. She had recently been interrogated by the agents, and there's some bruising visible on her arms, but she's willing to point Jen to them if it means getting them out of the town sooner.
The Blonskys are international agents working to retrieve The Hulk to "prevent further escalation" of his episodes. It's obvious that the Hulk is wanted for more than the public safety, and Emil barely pretends to care about the stated reasons for the mission, but Nadia is either competent enough at lying or a true believer in the original cause that Jen is willing to somewhat trust working with her. Jen manages to get Emil drunk and off focus, giving her a chance to approach Nadia, who she thought would be willing to work together on the Hulk issue without violence.
The two share their gathered data and work together to piece together a timeline on the Hulk's movements and his usual patterns, using surveillance information Blonsky was able to retrieve through international contacts and the information Jen's gathered on the ground and from people. They come to a conclusion on where the Hulk would be the next day, based off of their gathered information: the "savage gate," a now-abandoned tourist site deeper into the Rainforest, where urban legends claim an ancient civilization's greatest temple once stood. Jen provides the final information needed to figure out where the meeting site would be. With the information provided, Nadia apologizes to Jen and stabs her, pinning her hand against the table with a knife.
Nadia monologues: They had abandoned {organization}'s mission long ago. There was more money in being Hulk-hunters for the highest bidder, and there were more than enough bidders. She throws out various names, alluding to different Hulk antagonists for use in later films. Emil had wanted Jen dead, but when someone arrives and offers you such a gift of information as Jen did, Nadia swears it wouldn't be right to just kill them off. Jen, in pain, tries to reach over and pry the knife out of her hand; Nadia twists the blade in deeper and tells her to leave it in. Nadia insists that this is mercy, and that one day, Jen will thank her for it. But if Jen gets in the way of their hunt for the Hulk again, neither Nadia nor Emil will be so merciful again.
Nadia collects Jen's phone. After that, she gets up and leaves, kicking the building's creaky door down as she goes. Emil is seen rejoining her outside and giving a mocking wave to Jen; all the while, Jen struggles to unpin her hand from the table without pulling the knife out and causing more severe internal bleeding.
Jen stumbles through the town at night in search of help, making her way back to the house of the woman who pointed her to the Blonskys. Like the bartender's narration of the Green Scar earlier, she sees monsters in every shadow, and the pain drives her close to hallucinations. She reaches the woman's door and slumps against it, hammering weakly against it—the woman, luckily, is awake and pulls Jen into her living room. She starts to treat Jen's wound, while Jen in pain-induced delirium repeats pieces of the bartender's story of the Green Scar and insists she has to "save him tomorrow."
As the pain reduces and her mind starts to clear, she realizes she doesn't have until tomorrow. Ignoring the need for her wound to be completely treated and for her to go in and get work done on the ligaments/tendons within to prevent permanent damage, Jen gets up to go. Emil and Nadia will be on their way tonight, and if they get to Bruce, there's no telling what they'll do.
With her left-hand bound and unusable, Jen leaves the paramedic's house and returns to her motorcycle for a midnight drive through the rainforest. Racing against the clock, she follows old and abandoned roads to make her way to the old Savage Gate site. The paramedic follows after her subtly, calling others by cell as she does so. The bumps of the road cause her to nearly spin out several times, each time tearing more at her hand; the pain returns, and with-it delirium starts to set back in.
Bruce, meanwhile, awakens on the ground within Sofen's old shack. The chair he was in has been smashed through, a clear sign of the Hulk's presence, and raw meat is spread out throughout the room. They're recognizable as an northern Pudu that he partially consumed; feathers of several birds can also be seen spread out there. He struggles to his feet, ashamed of his failure to control the beast, and stumbles over to Dr. Sofen's desk. There, he picks up another laminated card, and looks on to the new set of coordinates given on it.
Jen, Bruce and the paramedic all move separately through the Amazon Rainforest, providing three different perspectives as they do so; Bruce sees the world fully through the eyes of the Green Scar, seeing monsters and hallucinations in every shadow. As he travels, he becomes overwhelmed at certain points, letting the Hulk break out and rampage further on into the wilds; the camera always cuts away when he's starting to transform. Jen sees the world in slight delirium brought on her pain, but she knows that it isn't real, and she knows that she shouldn't be seeing things just from the pain. The words of the bartender and the Green Scar keep going through her mind, and she's sure something is deeply wrong about this place. The paramedic sees everything as it actually is, including the bits of Bruce's rampages and Jen's near schizophrenic cycling in the wilds.
Jen's motorcycle finally does spin out as she's getting close to the Savage Gate, forcing her to complete the rest on foot as her injuries get worse. The paramedic following her trail on foot stops as she comes across the markings of the spun-out bike, and takes notice instead of another path through the woods, where an armored vehicle has been moving through. Looking down the path, she sees the lights of the Blonsky's vehicle in the distance, cutting through the dark underbrush.
Bruce sees bright lights coming from the wilds and hides. More hallucinations inhabit the new shadows the light creates, leading him to choke down more of Sofen's drink. With those gulps, he shudders, and soon enough he's transforming again. The first marks of his transformation, the stitches in his side and the marks on his arms where he had blood drawn, reopen. He smashes through nearby trees as he transforms, letting out a roar heard throughout their section of the rainforest.
The Blonskys spin their vehicle around some trees at the Hulk's roar and move for an engagement with the Hulk, hoping to bring him down. Emil fires at the Hulk with both live-weapons and tranquilizing weapons, neither of which prove effective at anything other than drawing the Hulk's attention to their vehicle. The Hulk attacks the vehicle itself, rather than either of the pair, brutally ripping it in half and throwing chunks towards different trees nearby. Emil and Nadia are thrown to different sides of the forested area; the Hulk pursues Emil as he hits the ground, lurching over him while Emil grips a leg clearly broken from his landing. Nadia pulls out her own gun, firing shots at the Hulk's back to draw his attention away from Emil.
The Hulk turns his attention to Nadia and ignores finishing off Emil. He lets out another roar and walks over to her, grabbing a torn chunk of car from the ground. He lifts it up over her, preparing to bring it crashing down onto her head, and Nadia panics in the moment. She drops her gun and stares up at him, meeting the Hulk in his eyes; and the Hulk looks away, dropping the chunk to the ground. With a new limp and lurch in his step, the Hulk stumbles further on into the wood, following his original trail. The Blonskys are left "for dead," but the paramedic is following on their path and will soon meet up with them.
With the Hulk delayed by the Blonskys, Jen is the first to arrive at the Savage Gate site—first other than Dr. Sofen, that is. Torches have been scattered and lit around the edges of the Savage Gate site, which appears as a circular clearing, much more well-maintained than the other roads and paths that led to it.
Sofen opines that she'd been wondering when Jen would arrive. Jen recognizes her as Bruce's old psychologist, disgraced from her trade and barred from her profession after another of her patients—victims—killed themselves in gruesome and primal fashion. Sofen doesn't dispute the claim, preferring to laugh about it and elaborate more.
Yes, she led them to die, what of it? They did not hold her interest, they did not hold her power. Sofen believes herself blessed, chosen by a higher power; the men she controlled on her route were experiments, and from each of them she learned more and more of her magic's lore.
Jen draws a handgun, struggling to hold and support it with her broken hand, and fires at Sofen while Sofen continues her speech. Blue light shimmers out around Sofen and incinerates the bullet, bringing the woman to further laughter and boasting inside her speech. She manifests the Moonstone within her hand, and in the dark of night, its blue light glows brilliantly across the clearing. The flames of the torch twist from red to blue, aligning and adding to her magic's light. All around the clearing's edge, the creatures and memories Jen saw in her delirium gather, waiting to collapse in and consume them both.
All Dr. Sofen has left to do is separate the Hulk from the coils of that pathetic Dr. Banner, and with Jen here, she's crafted the perfect opportunity. The guilt, the fear, the loathing she's built within Dr. Banner, it already threatens to consume him. If he were to see his own cousin, dead by his bloody hand… her Green Scar, her Mapinguari, her Hulk would finally be free. Free to serve her, forever, her steed, consort and king, and the entire world would be left spellbound, forced to fear the indomitable Hulk.
Jen is confident that Bruce would never attack her, not even in his Hulk state. Sofen agrees; that's why Jen will be the one attacking The Hulk. Did she think the fires, the ceremony, the speech was all for show? Sofen is a master hypnotist, and by now, Jen is already under her control. Sofen taps the Moonstone with a polished nail, and that same Arcane ping that came while she was putting Banner under her spell earlier drifts across the circle.
Jen's eyes dilate and darken as she falls under Sofen's control. At Sofen's order, she descends into the deeper mud at the Savage Gate's center, gripping on to her gun with her broken hand. She moves shakily and with rigid steps, controlled more like a puppet than an obedient follower, but she moves all the same.
A stumbling Bruce arrives. He has a new limp in his walk and has trouble even reaching Dr. Sofen, who is hardly holding back her disgust for him in her expression. Moonlight shines down on the clearing, illuminating the two of them, while Sofen's shadow swirls through the clearing to block Jen from the light. From Jen's perspective, we watch as Banner reaches Sofen in the clearing and embraces her, thanking her for the late-night session and confessing that things are getting worse again.
Banner sits down on a chair that isn't there and rests his arms on invisible arm-rests. Sofen approaches him, and the two of them re-enact the opening of Banner's last therapy session. Where before she drew his blood with a syringe, now she instead slashes his wrists with an illusory knife and spills his blood against the mud. Some sticks to her own nails. Where before she shackled him in place, now she merely mimes it, forming shackles of glowing illusion. Her hypnotized subject thrashes against a chair that is not really there. Jen lurches against Dr. Sofen's control, struggling to fight it off, and her hand rips open again at the movement. The immediate pain breaks her hypnosis, visualized her pupils contracting to normal sizes.
She lifts the Moonstone up before his eyes, and an illusory mirror forms within her hands and begins to spin. With each spin, the Bruce in the chair shakes more and more. His transformation starts and ends, starts and ends, starts and ends, each tremor leaving the human-Banner more and more physically distraught and pained.
She asks Banner is he is ready for the "final cure," and the Banner/Hulk agrees, speaking on in hypnotized voice. Sofen orders Jen to arise, and Jen pulls herself out from the mud, levying the gun to face Bruce.
Sofen orders Bruce to say good-bye to the Hulk. Bruce does, his voice cracking in the process. The creatures/memories/hallucinations gathered around the edge of the clearing grow, gnawing at the scenery and struggling to break into the circle. Sofen gestures for Jen to shoot.
Jen shoots, but she shoots at the Moonstone, not at Bruce or at Dr. Sofen. The recoil of the shot is too much for her damaged hand, so she drops the gun into the mud beside her. The bullet hits against the Moonstone and cracks the surface before being immolated in blue flame. The illusions wrapped around Bruce burn away in that same blue fire, leaving a confused Bruce to collapse down into the mud.
Enraged, Sofen taps her nail, still bloody with Bruce's blood, against the Moonstone again while barking an order for the Hulk to rise and kill Jen—the arcane chime from earlier comes again, but it is twisted, distorted. Bruce's eyes contract. He realizes who Jen is. Sofen's attempt at using the damaged Moonstone breaks the blue flame of her torches, and they return to the red color of their flame. The shadows/memories/hallucinations step through the barrier, approaching the gathered three with clear hunger in their form. They start closing in on the group.
Sofen continues to try and channel the power of the Moonstone, but more cracks are forming in it with each attempt. The blood on her nail is trickling into the Moonstone. The moonstone's light begins to glow again, though red-light comes out through the cracks; with each ripple and disturbed chime, the creatures encroaching on the circle become more and more real, taking on new flesh and blood. Like the solid-illusions she used to control and bind the Hulk, they become forces onto their own. Then, as the red-light overtakes the blue, the glow of Sofen's eyes changes color as well. She is consumed by her paranoia and her own deep fears, and she raises the cracked Moonstone high.
The gathered shadows coalesce together, consuming one another and turning to a new abomination. A shadowy-red mirror to the Hulk grows, far larger than the true transformation of the Hulk. The "fear-Hulk," drawn from Banner's own self-hatred and made manifest by the mad Sofen's failing Moonstone. The creature's face is sickeningly similar; it has the face of Bruce's father, the same face that's haunted him throughout the entire film.
An injured Jen reassures Bruce as the two face off against the creature. Red-Sofen praises the power of her new monster, and orders for him to kill Jen and Bruce; Bruce confesses more honestly to his self-doubts than he has throughout the whole movie, and Jen tells him that she's never been afraid of him, or of his transformations. She's known they're still him.
Enter the climactic Hulk vs the Fear-Hulk fight, while Red-Sofen and Jen struggle against each-other and try to avoid the collateral damage of the two superpowered heavies fighting. Red-Sofen tries to micromanage the Fear-Hulk throughout the fight, barking out orders and moving him like a puppet through the Moonstone/Bloodstone. The Hulk relies on his genius animal cunning, caring only about defeating the Fear-Hulk and keeping Jen safe from harm.
In the fight's end, Jen manages to wrestle the Moonstone/Bloodstone away from Red-Sofen, and she buries it deep within the mud. The mud, like the blood, drips into the stone's core. The Fear-Hulk has grown weaker and smaller throughout the fight, while Hulk has only grown in strength; eventually it is subdued entirely, and crumbles back to ash and shadow above the mud.
The paramedic, alongside Brazilian police company and the bartender from the story's start, arrive on the scene by helicopter. A mad/hysterical Sofen is taken into custody, joining Emil and Nadia in the hands of the Brazilian police. As the Hulk collapses to the ground, and back to being Bruce Banner, the group is collected and brought to a separate helicopter for medevac and questioning.
The paramedic tells Jen and Bruce that she hopes they have a good lawyer in town. Jen laughs; Bruce says his cousin is the best lawyer he knows. The paramedic looks between the two of them and calls them "hopeless" with a bemused smile on her face. The helicopter lifts off. Buried partially within the mud, the Moonstone glistens, waiting to be picked up and abused by another wannabe witch.
Per the preference expressed by the thread for a different villain than Umar, this version of the pitch now uses Karla Sofen/Moonstone. I think it leads to a less compelling finale than the original planned finale, but it is what it is. I may or may not do more revision work on it later on, but I'm leaning towards this being the final version of the pitch I work on. The end of the movie could be fleshed out to give more time for falling action and tie up some of the movie's loose ends, and should be if the pitch is utilized, but I don't currently have the energy to write potential scenes for that out. There are a variety of stingers that I think would work well with this; Nick Fury or another figure intervening and preventing those involved from going to any trial, another figure collecting the Moonstone as an artifact of power, or the Blonskys being bailed out and brought in to work with another group based on their experiences against the Hulk.
The appearance of the "Fear-Hulk" is w.e; Red-Sofen could also simply control the waves of shadow-beasts and hallucinated monsters. Really, it depends on how we want the scene choreographed and what the budget for CGI/Special Effects in that part is. The Blonskys might also benefit from a better defeat, but I enjoy the idea of human-level threats being swatted off by the Hulk as if they were bugs.
Genre: Psychological horror, thriller, action
Synopsis: Bruce Banner is a man on the run from the demons of his past, weaving in and out of towns on the edge of the Amazon. Overwhelmed by his own fears and anxieties, he never stays too long in one place, fearing the green monster that hunts him and the holes in his memories. He is tailed throughout the jungle by forces seeking to use the green scar to their own advantage (ex-KGB-turn-international secret agents Emil and Nadia Blonsky and the powerful hypnotist Sofen), while his cousin, Jennifer Walters, wades through the jungle in hopes of bringing her family back from the brink of madness.
Cast: Dr. Bruce Banner (The Hulk), Jennifer Walters, David Banner Hallucinations, Dr. Karla Sofen/Dr. Carla Sofia (Dr. Moonstone), Emil Blonsky & Nadia Blonsky (Russians, mid 30s), Wise bartender (50s, Brazilian man, "wise beyond his years" look), Brazilian paramedic (mid-20s, Brazilian woman), Brazilian extras, Hallucination extras
In a rural area of Jutaí (Amazonas, Brazil), an untidy Bruce Banner stumbles from the back table of a rundown bar to the front. His clothes are torn at the shoulders and at the knees, and bruises wrap up and down the sides of his body. He nearly collapses onto the bar, interrupting the conversation of some locals in the process, and buries his head in his hands. Blood is crusted beneath his fingernails.
One of the locals he interrupted puts her hand on his shoulder, asking if he's okay. The room is getting louder around Bruce, but he can't hear anything. He stares at the woman blankly, with the camera clearly showing his bloodshot eyes and the paleness of his face. His heart is thumping. The woman shakes him again and the bartender gets closer, and all of a sudden, he's hearing again. She's saying she's a paramedic and offering him help. The room is loud. The music, a Brazilian dance-beat, is thumping along with his heart. Bruce tries to stand up again, and this time the angle shows his bruises better; stitches can be seen up and down the sides of his body, marked over bruises turned green in color.
The woman beside him gasps as she sees the wounds down his side. The bartender waves a hand in front of Bruce's face, while Bruce shudders and tries to cover his ears from the blasting music. The bar's bouncers, two local men, come forward and grab Bruce's shoulders, ready to drag him out of the bar. They drag him off the stool. Bruce falls over, hitting the ground hard. The stitches on his side rip open again, and the border-of-consciousness Bruce goes through a painful transformation on the bar's floor. At first, the bouncers are ready to ignore it, and try to drag him out towards the door; but soon enough the Hulk is rising up from the ground.
A fight/flight breaks out as the bar's denizens scatter. One bouncer is dumb enough to try and fight the rising Hulk. Visibility of the fight is blurred in places. With the beat of the music, the Hulk's vision is fading in and out. There are holes in his memories, so there should be holes in how the fight has been presented, following the rhythm of the song being played.
In the end, only the woman who put her hand on his shoulder at the beginning remains in the bar, too terrified to try and get out past the Hulk. The green monster stares at her, and as realization dawns on its face, the Hulk slowly turns back to Bruce and falls down to his knees. Bruce looks on at her, his eyes still those of the Hulk but now colored with desperation, and the terrified woman runs.
Fear the Hulk.
Jennifer Walters pulls off her motorcycle helmet and steps into the mud in Jutaí. She unfolds a map of the Amazonas region, marked off with green Xs and newspaper clippings where the Mapinguari (the Brazilian Bigfoot legend) has been spotted in towns. Jutaí, the town she's arrived in, has the most markings by far. Walters makes her way to the bar of the opening sequence and finds it closed down; the windows have been boarded up to cover clear breaks in the glass. Still, there's light on inside the building, so she knocks on the door. The door rattles with the knocks, enough that it's clear it could easily be broken down or had already been broken down, but otherwise there's no response. She knocks on the door again and the light inside flickers off.
With one final and harder knock, the door swings open. The bartender of that night, now with his arm wrapped in a sling, looks over at Jennifer and spits. Haven't you Americans demanded enough by now? Jennifer is visibly taken aback by his anger, but the injured man waves her into the broken bar anyway. The devastation inside is much, much worse than what the opening had portrayed. Tables are broken. Shattered glass has been swept into piles throughout the room, and it glints with blood still stained on the glass.
Walters approaches with politeness, asking what the bartender remembered of what happened here. He's irritated by it. He's already talked to enough agents of the U.S. government, and he's already got his marks on file. If she wants to "piss around" with more American bull about gamma-radiation and super-soldiers, she should go find that "prick of an agent Blonsky" and nod off about it there. No, he's tired of it. There's something in his anger that makes it clear he has more he wants to say, so Walters eggs him on to find out what he believes really happened. He starts talking.
The Americans call it "science gone wrong," a modern Frankenstein, an indomitable Hulk, hah. The idiots around here call it the Mapinguari, but all they know of the old lore is the piss that's put in movies. He's seen it before that night, long ago in his youth, and he knows its name. The Green Scar. A creature from the Savage Land, who wanders among the living, cursed forever by the sins of his forefathers—While the old bartender narrates, the focus shifts from his bar to Banner, now stumbling alone through the Amazon Rainforest with a large stick as support, with new wounds visible across his body poorly mended.
The bartender narrates on the Green Scar seeing enemies in every shadow, as Banner clings to trees for support and inches his way past hunting snakes. The Green Scar clings to animals for companionship, for it trusts itself not with the kinship of humans; Banner falls over a twig and drops to his knees again, coming face to face with a large basilisk-lizard. But even those animals the Green Scar clings to know its true nature, and flee from the horror it brings on the world around it.
The bartender's narration matching with Bruce's action continues for a while. Bruce sees more than just animals lurking in the shadows of the underbrush. He sees images of the Hulk lurking behind the trees. He sees memories scattered through the wood; the Hulk hurting people, his father screaming and his mother in fights, the lights of government research facilities and more. Those memories terrify him more than any of the horrors of the rainforest. He drinks from his flask as he makes his way through the jungle, to calm his nerves and his anxieties, but the demons he sees grow larger with each drink. It is implied to be alcohol. He refocuses himself on a card in his hand, a set of coordinates and a signature from Dr. Sofen.
Bruce progressively journeys through a section of the Amazon Rainforest, finally making his way out of the woods and into another small Amazonas town. There, he hopes to eat as a human (if he was too close to starving, the Hulk would force itself out and feed on whatever it could take, be it raw meat or etc.). Bruce recognizes a woman in the town.
The focus returns to the bartender finishing his long speech on the horrors of the "Green Scar" with a note on family and loved ones. It's clear he has some personal experience with it as he speaks on the wicked curse of seeing someone you love so afflicted. He warns Walters to stay away from the creature, and to abandon whatever plan her infernal government has for him; she reveals she isn't working with an organization to track the Hulk, and that she's his cousin, tracking him down to find help.
On that dramatized reveal, the Act ends. The focus comes back to Bruce.
Bruce makes his way over to the woman he recognized, and she's shocked to see he's made it. She scolds him for being "late," which Bruce tries to laugh off. Bruce embraces her, and it's awkward. She's revealed to be Dr. Karla Sofen, an old colleague of his and a native Brazilian, whose been working with Bruce to create a cure for his condition. Bruce clings on to her for support and stability in his ruined life, but Dr. Sofen does not do the same. There is something malevolent about Dr. Sofen from the start, but in this initial scene, it should be played off as a sort of anxiety or discomfort rather than true malice towards Bruce.
Sofen and Bruce make their way to Sofen's makeshift lab (really, a run-down shack) and settle down. Bruce drinks again from his flask to calm his nerve and his rising heart-beat, which Sofen wholeheartedly supports, suggesting that "the drink" keeps the Beast inside tamed. Bruce is hesitant at that statement, seeing bits of his fight in the bar in the shadows of the shack, but he doesn't outwardly confront her on it. Sofen refills Bruce's flask with mysterious liquids and provides food for Bruce, but it's closer to scraps than it is to an actual meal; she jokes that the food is the only thing that keeps him coming for his treatments.
Bruce sits while Sofen shackles him into his chair. She asks him if he's been having any negative side-effects from his treatments; Bruce stares forward and says that there's nothing new. Just the visions. He's been seeing his cousin more often these past days, and hopes it's a sign. Dr. Sofen recommends he doesn't get his hopes up. They choose Brazil for a reason, to get him away from all of the reminders of the outside world, and a hesitant Bruce agrees with her.
The lights inside Sofen's shack flicker, and come back stronger, giving Bruce hallucinations of the long hallways of the medical facility where the gamma-radiation experiments took place. His father lurks in the distance on the edge of the hallway, slamming the door shut on a young Walters family.
Sofen draws samples from Bruce's blood. Where her needle pricks his skin, his flesh immediately ripples out in green. She puts the samples to the side of her lab; her collection of blood samples and other materials looks closer to the work of a mad scientist or a witch than the collection of an actual doctor. From her collected materials, she pulls forth a black-bound tome, a silvered mirror and a brilliant diamond.
Sofen sits down across from Bruce, setting the book on the table between them and opening it. Impressive and colorful drawings are scattered across the pages, depicting green scars through the world and savage creatures of foreign lands. The book is more of a prop than an actual point of focus, however.
Sofen places the silvered mirror between the two of them. It is on a sort of dolly, staying upright on its own. She instructs Bruce to look in the mirror, and tell her if he sees anything unusual in it. Bruce, already staring into the mirror, sees himself in the glass; but behind him, down the hallucinatory lanes of that old medical facility, he sees shadows lurking. His father. His mother, limping. And the green monster, lurking, inching closer and closer to him.
Sofen taps the mirror's back, and it spins. There's an arcane "pinging" noise when the mirror spins that dilates Bruce's eyes. While the mirrors spin, Sofen's eyes and her diamond glow gently with the magic power they're channeling to the mirror. The silvered etchings around the mirror's edge glow as well, just as faintly.
When the mirror again faces Bruce, the images in it are different; he sees his father closer now, lurking, a bottle lifted to his lips. Bruce's eyes are more bloodshot now, and the Hulk is closer to him in the shadows. Anxiety is starting to take over in the visions and in reality, as Bruce begins to dig his nails into the wood of the chair. Blood gathers beneath his nails. Sofen insists that he calm down as she spins the mirror again; it is alright to let it all out. This is a safe space for him. She is a trained hypnotist, and she knows what is best for Mr. Banner.
Bruce, in a partial trance, repeats after her. The mirror spins again, and again, and the trance grows. The Hulk grows closer and closer in the reflection, until he has overtaken Bruce inside of it; no longer does Bruce see himself in the mirror, only the Hulk, hungry, ready, waiting to be let out of the mirror and into the world of the living once more.
Sofen stops spinning the mirror as the entranced and drunk Banner stares on into the mirror, a green shade taking over her eyes. She monologues, speculating on how many more sessions it will take before "the final cure sets in;" the entranced Banner mumbles on after her, repeating her mention of a "final cure" in a tone somewhere between his and the Hulk's. She collects her artifacts from the shack and departs, leaving Bruce to sit alone inside the room. The scene fades with Banner reeling, still entranced and watching as The Hulk takes over within his mind.
Days later, following a lead from the bartender, Jen tracks down Nadia Blonsky and Emil Blonsky to another rural area of the Jutaí region. She gets off her motorcycle and steps into the deep mud with a familiar groan. She's able to track down Nadia and Emil quickly after some talk with local towns people; one of them is the woman from the credits-intro scene, who tried to help Banner as he was injured. She had recently been interrogated by the agents, and there's some bruising visible on her arms, but she's willing to point Jen to them if it means getting them out of the town sooner.
The Blonskys are international agents working to retrieve The Hulk to "prevent further escalation" of his episodes. It's obvious that the Hulk is wanted for more than the public safety, and Emil barely pretends to care about the stated reasons for the mission, but Nadia is either competent enough at lying or a true believer in the original cause that Jen is willing to somewhat trust working with her. Jen manages to get Emil drunk and off focus, giving her a chance to approach Nadia, who she thought would be willing to work together on the Hulk issue without violence.
The two share their gathered data and work together to piece together a timeline on the Hulk's movements and his usual patterns, using surveillance information Blonsky was able to retrieve through international contacts and the information Jen's gathered on the ground and from people. They come to a conclusion on where the Hulk would be the next day, based off of their gathered information: the "savage gate," a now-abandoned tourist site deeper into the Rainforest, where urban legends claim an ancient civilization's greatest temple once stood. Jen provides the final information needed to figure out where the meeting site would be. With the information provided, Nadia apologizes to Jen and stabs her, pinning her hand against the table with a knife.
Nadia monologues: They had abandoned {organization}'s mission long ago. There was more money in being Hulk-hunters for the highest bidder, and there were more than enough bidders. She throws out various names, alluding to different Hulk antagonists for use in later films. Emil had wanted Jen dead, but when someone arrives and offers you such a gift of information as Jen did, Nadia swears it wouldn't be right to just kill them off. Jen, in pain, tries to reach over and pry the knife out of her hand; Nadia twists the blade in deeper and tells her to leave it in. Nadia insists that this is mercy, and that one day, Jen will thank her for it. But if Jen gets in the way of their hunt for the Hulk again, neither Nadia nor Emil will be so merciful again.
Nadia collects Jen's phone. After that, she gets up and leaves, kicking the building's creaky door down as she goes. Emil is seen rejoining her outside and giving a mocking wave to Jen; all the while, Jen struggles to unpin her hand from the table without pulling the knife out and causing more severe internal bleeding.
Jen stumbles through the town at night in search of help, making her way back to the house of the woman who pointed her to the Blonskys. Like the bartender's narration of the Green Scar earlier, she sees monsters in every shadow, and the pain drives her close to hallucinations. She reaches the woman's door and slumps against it, hammering weakly against it—the woman, luckily, is awake and pulls Jen into her living room. She starts to treat Jen's wound, while Jen in pain-induced delirium repeats pieces of the bartender's story of the Green Scar and insists she has to "save him tomorrow."
As the pain reduces and her mind starts to clear, she realizes she doesn't have until tomorrow. Ignoring the need for her wound to be completely treated and for her to go in and get work done on the ligaments/tendons within to prevent permanent damage, Jen gets up to go. Emil and Nadia will be on their way tonight, and if they get to Bruce, there's no telling what they'll do.
With her left-hand bound and unusable, Jen leaves the paramedic's house and returns to her motorcycle for a midnight drive through the rainforest. Racing against the clock, she follows old and abandoned roads to make her way to the old Savage Gate site. The paramedic follows after her subtly, calling others by cell as she does so. The bumps of the road cause her to nearly spin out several times, each time tearing more at her hand; the pain returns, and with-it delirium starts to set back in.
Bruce, meanwhile, awakens on the ground within Sofen's old shack. The chair he was in has been smashed through, a clear sign of the Hulk's presence, and raw meat is spread out throughout the room. They're recognizable as an northern Pudu that he partially consumed; feathers of several birds can also be seen spread out there. He struggles to his feet, ashamed of his failure to control the beast, and stumbles over to Dr. Sofen's desk. There, he picks up another laminated card, and looks on to the new set of coordinates given on it.
Jen, Bruce and the paramedic all move separately through the Amazon Rainforest, providing three different perspectives as they do so; Bruce sees the world fully through the eyes of the Green Scar, seeing monsters and hallucinations in every shadow. As he travels, he becomes overwhelmed at certain points, letting the Hulk break out and rampage further on into the wilds; the camera always cuts away when he's starting to transform. Jen sees the world in slight delirium brought on her pain, but she knows that it isn't real, and she knows that she shouldn't be seeing things just from the pain. The words of the bartender and the Green Scar keep going through her mind, and she's sure something is deeply wrong about this place. The paramedic sees everything as it actually is, including the bits of Bruce's rampages and Jen's near schizophrenic cycling in the wilds.
Jen's motorcycle finally does spin out as she's getting close to the Savage Gate, forcing her to complete the rest on foot as her injuries get worse. The paramedic following her trail on foot stops as she comes across the markings of the spun-out bike, and takes notice instead of another path through the woods, where an armored vehicle has been moving through. Looking down the path, she sees the lights of the Blonsky's vehicle in the distance, cutting through the dark underbrush.
Bruce sees bright lights coming from the wilds and hides. More hallucinations inhabit the new shadows the light creates, leading him to choke down more of Sofen's drink. With those gulps, he shudders, and soon enough he's transforming again. The first marks of his transformation, the stitches in his side and the marks on his arms where he had blood drawn, reopen. He smashes through nearby trees as he transforms, letting out a roar heard throughout their section of the rainforest.
The Blonskys spin their vehicle around some trees at the Hulk's roar and move for an engagement with the Hulk, hoping to bring him down. Emil fires at the Hulk with both live-weapons and tranquilizing weapons, neither of which prove effective at anything other than drawing the Hulk's attention to their vehicle. The Hulk attacks the vehicle itself, rather than either of the pair, brutally ripping it in half and throwing chunks towards different trees nearby. Emil and Nadia are thrown to different sides of the forested area; the Hulk pursues Emil as he hits the ground, lurching over him while Emil grips a leg clearly broken from his landing. Nadia pulls out her own gun, firing shots at the Hulk's back to draw his attention away from Emil.
The Hulk turns his attention to Nadia and ignores finishing off Emil. He lets out another roar and walks over to her, grabbing a torn chunk of car from the ground. He lifts it up over her, preparing to bring it crashing down onto her head, and Nadia panics in the moment. She drops her gun and stares up at him, meeting the Hulk in his eyes; and the Hulk looks away, dropping the chunk to the ground. With a new limp and lurch in his step, the Hulk stumbles further on into the wood, following his original trail. The Blonskys are left "for dead," but the paramedic is following on their path and will soon meet up with them.
With the Hulk delayed by the Blonskys, Jen is the first to arrive at the Savage Gate site—first other than Dr. Sofen, that is. Torches have been scattered and lit around the edges of the Savage Gate site, which appears as a circular clearing, much more well-maintained than the other roads and paths that led to it.
Sofen opines that she'd been wondering when Jen would arrive. Jen recognizes her as Bruce's old psychologist, disgraced from her trade and barred from her profession after another of her patients—victims—killed themselves in gruesome and primal fashion. Sofen doesn't dispute the claim, preferring to laugh about it and elaborate more.
Yes, she led them to die, what of it? They did not hold her interest, they did not hold her power. Sofen believes herself blessed, chosen by a higher power; the men she controlled on her route were experiments, and from each of them she learned more and more of her magic's lore.
Jen draws a handgun, struggling to hold and support it with her broken hand, and fires at Sofen while Sofen continues her speech. Blue light shimmers out around Sofen and incinerates the bullet, bringing the woman to further laughter and boasting inside her speech. She manifests the Moonstone within her hand, and in the dark of night, its blue light glows brilliantly across the clearing. The flames of the torch twist from red to blue, aligning and adding to her magic's light. All around the clearing's edge, the creatures and memories Jen saw in her delirium gather, waiting to collapse in and consume them both.
All Dr. Sofen has left to do is separate the Hulk from the coils of that pathetic Dr. Banner, and with Jen here, she's crafted the perfect opportunity. The guilt, the fear, the loathing she's built within Dr. Banner, it already threatens to consume him. If he were to see his own cousin, dead by his bloody hand… her Green Scar, her Mapinguari, her Hulk would finally be free. Free to serve her, forever, her steed, consort and king, and the entire world would be left spellbound, forced to fear the indomitable Hulk.
Jen is confident that Bruce would never attack her, not even in his Hulk state. Sofen agrees; that's why Jen will be the one attacking The Hulk. Did she think the fires, the ceremony, the speech was all for show? Sofen is a master hypnotist, and by now, Jen is already under her control. Sofen taps the Moonstone with a polished nail, and that same Arcane ping that came while she was putting Banner under her spell earlier drifts across the circle.
Jen's eyes dilate and darken as she falls under Sofen's control. At Sofen's order, she descends into the deeper mud at the Savage Gate's center, gripping on to her gun with her broken hand. She moves shakily and with rigid steps, controlled more like a puppet than an obedient follower, but she moves all the same.
A stumbling Bruce arrives. He has a new limp in his walk and has trouble even reaching Dr. Sofen, who is hardly holding back her disgust for him in her expression. Moonlight shines down on the clearing, illuminating the two of them, while Sofen's shadow swirls through the clearing to block Jen from the light. From Jen's perspective, we watch as Banner reaches Sofen in the clearing and embraces her, thanking her for the late-night session and confessing that things are getting worse again.
Banner sits down on a chair that isn't there and rests his arms on invisible arm-rests. Sofen approaches him, and the two of them re-enact the opening of Banner's last therapy session. Where before she drew his blood with a syringe, now she instead slashes his wrists with an illusory knife and spills his blood against the mud. Some sticks to her own nails. Where before she shackled him in place, now she merely mimes it, forming shackles of glowing illusion. Her hypnotized subject thrashes against a chair that is not really there. Jen lurches against Dr. Sofen's control, struggling to fight it off, and her hand rips open again at the movement. The immediate pain breaks her hypnosis, visualized her pupils contracting to normal sizes.
She lifts the Moonstone up before his eyes, and an illusory mirror forms within her hands and begins to spin. With each spin, the Bruce in the chair shakes more and more. His transformation starts and ends, starts and ends, starts and ends, each tremor leaving the human-Banner more and more physically distraught and pained.
She asks Banner is he is ready for the "final cure," and the Banner/Hulk agrees, speaking on in hypnotized voice. Sofen orders Jen to arise, and Jen pulls herself out from the mud, levying the gun to face Bruce.
Sofen orders Bruce to say good-bye to the Hulk. Bruce does, his voice cracking in the process. The creatures/memories/hallucinations gathered around the edge of the clearing grow, gnawing at the scenery and struggling to break into the circle. Sofen gestures for Jen to shoot.
Jen shoots, but she shoots at the Moonstone, not at Bruce or at Dr. Sofen. The recoil of the shot is too much for her damaged hand, so she drops the gun into the mud beside her. The bullet hits against the Moonstone and cracks the surface before being immolated in blue flame. The illusions wrapped around Bruce burn away in that same blue fire, leaving a confused Bruce to collapse down into the mud.
Enraged, Sofen taps her nail, still bloody with Bruce's blood, against the Moonstone again while barking an order for the Hulk to rise and kill Jen—the arcane chime from earlier comes again, but it is twisted, distorted. Bruce's eyes contract. He realizes who Jen is. Sofen's attempt at using the damaged Moonstone breaks the blue flame of her torches, and they return to the red color of their flame. The shadows/memories/hallucinations step through the barrier, approaching the gathered three with clear hunger in their form. They start closing in on the group.
Sofen continues to try and channel the power of the Moonstone, but more cracks are forming in it with each attempt. The blood on her nail is trickling into the Moonstone. The moonstone's light begins to glow again, though red-light comes out through the cracks; with each ripple and disturbed chime, the creatures encroaching on the circle become more and more real, taking on new flesh and blood. Like the solid-illusions she used to control and bind the Hulk, they become forces onto their own. Then, as the red-light overtakes the blue, the glow of Sofen's eyes changes color as well. She is consumed by her paranoia and her own deep fears, and she raises the cracked Moonstone high.
The gathered shadows coalesce together, consuming one another and turning to a new abomination. A shadowy-red mirror to the Hulk grows, far larger than the true transformation of the Hulk. The "fear-Hulk," drawn from Banner's own self-hatred and made manifest by the mad Sofen's failing Moonstone. The creature's face is sickeningly similar; it has the face of Bruce's father, the same face that's haunted him throughout the entire film.
An injured Jen reassures Bruce as the two face off against the creature. Red-Sofen praises the power of her new monster, and orders for him to kill Jen and Bruce; Bruce confesses more honestly to his self-doubts than he has throughout the whole movie, and Jen tells him that she's never been afraid of him, or of his transformations. She's known they're still him.
Enter the climactic Hulk vs the Fear-Hulk fight, while Red-Sofen and Jen struggle against each-other and try to avoid the collateral damage of the two superpowered heavies fighting. Red-Sofen tries to micromanage the Fear-Hulk throughout the fight, barking out orders and moving him like a puppet through the Moonstone/Bloodstone. The Hulk relies on his genius animal cunning, caring only about defeating the Fear-Hulk and keeping Jen safe from harm.
In the fight's end, Jen manages to wrestle the Moonstone/Bloodstone away from Red-Sofen, and she buries it deep within the mud. The mud, like the blood, drips into the stone's core. The Fear-Hulk has grown weaker and smaller throughout the fight, while Hulk has only grown in strength; eventually it is subdued entirely, and crumbles back to ash and shadow above the mud.
The paramedic, alongside Brazilian police company and the bartender from the story's start, arrive on the scene by helicopter. A mad/hysterical Sofen is taken into custody, joining Emil and Nadia in the hands of the Brazilian police. As the Hulk collapses to the ground, and back to being Bruce Banner, the group is collected and brought to a separate helicopter for medevac and questioning.
The paramedic tells Jen and Bruce that she hopes they have a good lawyer in town. Jen laughs; Bruce says his cousin is the best lawyer he knows. The paramedic looks between the two of them and calls them "hopeless" with a bemused smile on her face. The helicopter lifts off. Buried partially within the mud, the Moonstone glistens, waiting to be picked up and abused by another wannabe witch.
Going to be brief cause of IRL complications. There are some details I think could be improved. I think instead of having the Blonsky's work for some unknown organization that we could just have them had initially worked for General Ross (probably just calling him "the General chasing the Hulk" or something like that to very loosely tie them to the Ang Lee film). Second I think that the Moonstone/Bloodstone kind of has a few issues similar to Umar's magic where it's effects/abilities aren't well set up before the third act climax. I think that if you could somehow weave the stone into the story about the Green Scar and mention something about its abilities beforehand so the capacity doesn't come out of nowhere before it shows up it succeeds.
All that being said you were willing to compromise for some of the stuff I wanted so I'm willing to fully back this pitch getting made. It's not perfect, and Perlmutter remains a potential problem for this but I'll support this because it's an interesting story that I think could work well and I do like it a lot. You made the change I was most insistent on so I'm behind this pitch.
Switching my vote to coincide with what you want for this movie
[x] Plan: For Future Submariners
Edit: possible solution to the Perlmutter stuff I was worried about, market the hell out of Devil-Hulk and keep it as the villain being promoted in advertising, toys and such.
Going to be brief cause of IRL complications. There are some details I think could be improved. I think instead of having the Blonsky's work for some unknown organization that we could just have them had initially worked for General Ross (probably just calling him "the General chasing the Hulk" or something like that to very loosely tie them to the Ang Lee film). Second I think that the Moonstone/Bloodstone kind of has a few issues similar to Umar's magic where it's effects/abilities aren't well set up before the third act climax. I think that if you could somehow weave the stone into the story about the Green Scar and mention something about its abilities beforehand so the capacity doesn't come out of nowhere before it shows up it succeeds.
All that being said you were willing to compromise for some of the stuff I wanted so I'm willing to fully back this pitch getting made. It's not perfect, and Perlmutter remains a potential problem for this but I'll support this because it's an interesting story that I think could work well and I do like it a lot. You made the change I was most insistent on so I'm behind this pitch.
Switching my vote to coincide with what you want for this movie
[x] Plan: For Future Submariners
Edit: possible solution to the Perlmutter stuff I was worried about, market the hell out of Devil-Hulk and keep it as the villain being promoted in advertising, toys and such.
I don't have any qualms with the Blonskys originally working with General Ross, it's just a question of if we want them to be defecting from Ross or defecting from someone else to be picked up by Ross (or I guess, defecting from Ross and then crawling back to him later on). We could cut out the defection bit entirely if we want, but I think it makes them a bit more fleshed out of characters. I think that detail is something we could decide on if we lock the pitch in. I don't disagree much with the Moonstone/Bloodstone note. It's part of why I was more in favor of Umar; I think "magical sorceress" is an easier buy-in than "sorceress empowered by magical item." If we add in a scene with Bruce talking to someone else earlier on, that might be a good area to flesh it out.
I think "magical sorceress" is an easier buy-in than "sorceress empowered by magical item." If we add in a scene with Bruce talking to someone else earlier on, that might be a good area to flesh it out.
I don't necessarily think one is easier than another but I think that it's much easier to have an outside force explain the powers of the Moonstone than it is with Umar.
Like it's significantly easier for us to give limits/foreshadow on what the Moonstone can and cannot do for the audience to be aware of what it does with like a stranger living there and talking about it. I think it's a lot harder to have someone who's not Umar give limits/foreshadow Umar's abilities properly. Like I'm of the opinion that people ought to know the Moonstone can do a thing before the Moonstone is used to do a thing and we can more easily lay that out then explaining how Umar's stuff works preemptively.
Whatever we introduce needs to be somewhat defined and have limits so that people can understand why things happen the way they do. Umar's magic was as problematic as it was because it worked one way and then another, and there was no effective way to explain why it was always one way before the third act and then different afterwards. With the Moonstone, we can lay out exactly what it does all at the beginning through a legend or something so that when it does a new thing it's not actually wholly new to the audience and thus doesn't feel like it came out of nowhere. I think it's something we can reasonably expect to be fleshed out in the movie as a part of the dialogue not listed in the pitch.
>The Incredible Hulk was Marvel Studios' safe bet, while Iron Man was the risky side project.
>Robert Downey Jr. met with Marvel Entertainment about playing Doctor Doom in 2005's Fantastic Four.
>The original Iron Man script was terrible. The Mandarin was the villain and his plan was to dig a tunnel under Stark Industries to steal Stark's inventions. The story only came together when Jon Favreau decided to make Obadiah Stane the villain and give him his own suit.
>There is a deleted scene revealing Stark Industries built Doctor Octopus' arms from Spider-Man 2 and an alternative post-credits scene where Nick Fury directly references "radioactive spider bites" and "assorted genetic mutations" as other shit SHIELD is dealing with.
>The Iron Man post-credits scene was supposed to be just a fun nod to the comics. They only started seriously considering doing an Avengers movie after Iron Man was a box office hit.
>Ike Perlmutter originally didn't want to pay the royalties to feature Black Sabbath's "Iron Man" in the movie.
>Earlier drafts of The Avengers were very Iron Man-centric per the demands of the Marvel Creative Committee and even featured Zeke Stane as a supporting villain alongside Loki.
>Scarlett Johansson nearly dropped out of The Avengers due to salary disputes, so Joss Whedon wrote a couple of drafts replacing Black Widow for The Wasp, and he wanted Zooey Deschanel for the role. When Johansson ultimately signed on, the Wasp was cut to focus on the preexisting characters.
>Iron Man 3 was rewritten so many times that they only managed to figure out the third act because RDJ had to take a six weeks leave after an on-set injury.
>Loki originally had a really small role in Thor: The Dark World and would have died for real, but the character became so popular after The Avengers that they did reshoots to give him more scenes and change his fate.
>The original plan was to introduce Gamora, Drax and Rocket & Groot in three Marvel One-Shots ahead of Guardians of the Galaxy, followed by a fourth one-shot about young Peter Quill ending with him being abducted by the Ravagers.
>The Marvel Creative Committee was against Star-Lord's Awesome Mixtape, but Kevin Feige and James Gunn managed to convince them to keep it.
>There were persistent rumors that Marvel would adapt "Planet Hulk" during production of Avengers: Age of Ultron, so Feige changed the original ending where Hulk's Quinjet flies into orbit and disappears in space to it disappearing over the ocean to avoid giving fans false hopes. They wound up adapting "Planet Hulk" into Thor: Ragnarok anyway.
>Captain Marvel was originally going to be introduced as a member of the New Avengers at the end of Age of Ultron to set up her spinoff solo film.
>Paul Rudd, Evangeline Lily and Michael Douglas nearly quit Ant-Man after Edgar Wright's departure.
>Captain America: Civil War led to a real life civil war between Feige and the Marvel Creative Committee that led to the Disney CEO Alan Horn disband the committee in 2017 and giving Feige full control of Marvel Studios.
>The breaking point was that the committee was against the fight between Captain America and Iron Man in the end. Instead, they wanted Cap, Stark and Bucky to team up against Zemo and the brainwashed HYDRA supersoldiers. Feige, the Russos and writers Christopher Markus & Stephen McFeely all argued in favor of the Cap/Stark fight, and the Russos were ready to quit if they were forced to do the committee's version.
>The committee was also against Giant-Man, so an alternative airport battle was drafted where Scarlet Witch blows up an underground pipeline as Team Cap's big diversion.
>The committee was also against Ego turning out to be evil in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol.2 claiming audiences would complain if Kurt Russell and Chris Pratt were advertised as a father-son duo only for Russell to turn out to be evil.
>After The Amazing Spider-Man 2 underperformed, Feige approached Amy Pascal to let Marvel Studios take over and reboot Spider-Man instead of moving forward with The Amazing Spider-Man 3. Pascal was so angry at first she threw a sandwich at Feige and kicked him out of her office.
>Tom Holland sent several videos of himself doing acrobatics and stunts in his backyard as part of his audition process for Spider-Man. Jon Watts and the previz department used the video as the basis to choreograph Spider-Man's fight scenes in Spider-Man: Homecoming.
>Taika Waititi almost didn't land the Ragnarok gig. He was in Hawaii and had to meet Feige in Los Angeles to talk about the movie, but his passport was held in New Zealand. He only managed to make it because he had written the first draft of Moana and still had his Disney visa letter.
>Anthony Hopkins was the one who pushed for Odin to die as a delusional vagrant in the streets of New York in Ragnarok, since he hated cheesy family reunion scenes. Waititi agreed at first, but after the scene tested poorly, he conceded that Thor and Loki needed a genuine final moment with their father and convinced Hopkins to reshoot the scene.
>Paul Rudd was busy filming Avengers: Endgame for long stretches of the Ant-Man and the Wasp production, so they basically filmed everybody else's scenes first while waiting for Rudd to come back.
>The idea for the all-female scene in Endgame came from pic related that the actresses took during a filming break. They were afraid it could come across as pandering, so they did reshoots to include more scenes of the characters fighting together beforehand so the big team-up felt more organic (it didn't).
>Feige wanted to use Daredevil, Punisher and Ghost Rider in the MCU, but Perlmutter embargoed them he could build a "Marvel television empire" on Netflix.
>Chris Evans was reluctant to audition for Captain America after having already done the Fantastic Four movie and it was RDJ who persuaded him.
>Chris Hemsworth thought he was going to be phased out of the MCU when he found out he wasn't going to be in Civil War.
>Mark Ruffalo was the one who came up with the dynamic between Hulk and Banner from Ragnarok and on, where Banner is afraid of becoming Banner and resentful of being seen as a monster and used as a weapon.
>Paul Bettany had been told by his agent that he would probably never land a big role again moments before getting a call about playing Vision in Age of Ultron.
>Stark originally said nothing when he snapped Thanos away in Endgame. After test-screenings the Russos felt he needed to have one final line and considered many options before the editor suggested "and I am Iron Man" as a callback to the first movie. Filming Stark's death was difficult for RDJ so he was reluctant to go back to reshoot it at first.
>The Incredible Hulk was Marvel Studios' safe bet, while Iron Man was the risky side project.
>Robert Downey Jr. met with Marvel Entertainment about playing Doctor Doom in 2005's Fantastic Four.
>The original Iron Man script was terrible. The Mandarin was the villain and his plan was to dig a tunnel under Stark Industries to steal Stark's inventions. The story only came together when Jon Favreau decided to make Obadiah Stane the villain and give him his own suit.
>There is a deleted scene revealing Stark Industries built Doctor Octopus' arms from Spider-Man 2 and an alternative post-credits scene where Nick Fury directly references "radioactive spider bites" and "assorted genetic mutations" as other shit SHIELD is dealing with.
>The Iron Man post-credits scene was supposed to be just a fun nod to the comics. They only started seriously considering doing an Avengers movie after Iron Man was a box office hit.
>Ike Perlmutter originally didn't want to pay the royalties to feature Black Sabbath's "Iron Man" in the movie.
>Earlier drafts of The Avengers were very Iron Man-centric per the demands of the Marvel Creative Committee and even featured Zeke Stane as a supporting villain alongside Loki.
>Scarlett Johansson nearly dropped out of The Avengers due to salary disputes, so Joss Whedon wrote a couple of drafts replacing Black Widow for The Wasp, and he wanted Zooey Deschanel for the role. When Johansson ultimately signed on, the Wasp was cut to focus on the preexisting characters.
>Iron Man 3 was rewritten so many times that they only managed to figure out the third act because RDJ had to take a six weeks leave after an on-set injury.
>Loki originally had a really small role in Thor: The Dark World and would have died for real, but the character became so popular after The Avengers that they did reshoots to give him more scenes and change his fate.
>The original plan was to introduce Gamora, Drax and Rocket & Groot in three Marvel One-Shots ahead of Guardians of the Galaxy, followed by a fourth one-shot about young Peter Quill ending with him being abducted by the Ravagers.
>The Marvel Creative Committee was against Star-Lord's Awesome Mixtape, but Kevin Feige and James Gunn managed to convince them to keep it.
>There were persistent rumors that Marvel would adapt "Planet Hulk" during production of Avengers: Age of Ultron, so Feige changed the original ending where Hulk's Quinjet flies into orbit and disappears in space to it disappearing over the ocean to avoid giving fans false hopes. They wound up adapting "Planet Hulk" into Thor: Ragnarok anyway.
>Captain Marvel was originally going to be introduced as a member of the New Avengers at the end of Age of Ultron to set up her spinoff solo film.
>Paul Rudd, Evangeline Lily and Michael Douglas nearly quit Ant-Man after Edgar Wright's departure.
>Captain America: Civil War led to a real life civil war between Feige and the Marvel Creative Committee that led to the Disney CEO Alan Horn disband the committee in 2017 and giving Feige full control of Marvel Studios.
>The breaking point was that the committee was against the fight between Captain America and Iron Man in the end. Instead, they wanted Cap, Stark and Bucky to team up against Zemo and the brainwashed HYDRA supersoldiers. Feige, the Russos and writers Christopher Markus & Stephen McFeely all argued in favor of the Cap/Stark fight, and the Russos were ready to quit if they were forced to do the committee's version.
>The committee was also against Giant-Man, so an alternative airport battle was drafted where Scarlet Witch blows up an underground pipeline as Team Cap's big diversion.
>The committee was also against Ego turning out to be evil in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol.2 claiming audiences would complain if Kurt Russell and Chris Pratt were advertised as a father-son duo only for Russell to turn out to be evil.
>After The Amazing Spider-Man 2 underperformed, Feige approached Amy Pascal to let Marvel Studios take over and reboot Spider-Man instead of moving forward with The Amazing Spider-Man 3. Pascal was so angry at first she threw a sandwich at Feige and kicked him out of her office.
>Tom Holland sent several videos of himself doing acrobatics and stunts in his backyard as part of his audition process for Spider-Man. Jon Watts and the previz department used the video as the basis to choreograph Spider-Man's fight scenes in Spider-Man: Homecoming.
>Taika Waititi almost didn't land the Ragnarok gig. He was in Hawaii and had to meet Feige in Los Angeles to talk about the movie, but his passport was held in New Zealand. He only managed to make it because he had written the first draft of Moana and still had his Disney visa letter.
>Anthony Hopkins was the one who pushed for Odin to die as a delusional vagrant in the streets of New York in Ragnarok, since he hated cheesy family reunion scenes. Waititi agreed at first, but after the scene tested poorly, he conceded that Thor and Loki needed a genuine final moment with their father and convinced Hopkins to reshoot the scene.
>Paul Rudd was busy filming Avengers: Endgame for long stretches of the Ant-Man and the Wasp production, so they basically filmed everybody else's scenes first while waiting for Rudd to come back.
>The idea for the all-female scene in Endgame came from pic related that the actresses took during a filming break. They were afraid it could come across as pandering, so they did reshoots to include more scenes of the characters fighting together beforehand so the big team-up felt more organic (it didn't).
>Feige wanted to use Daredevil, Punisher and Ghost Rider in the MCU, but Perlmutter embargoed them he could build a "Marvel television empire" on Netflix.
>Chris Evans was reluctant to audition for Captain America after having already done the Fantastic Four movie and it was RDJ who persuaded him.
>Chris Hemsworth thought he was going to be phased out of the MCU when he found out he wasn't going to be in Civil War.
>Mark Ruffalo was the one who came up with the dynamic between Hulk and Banner from Ragnarok and on, where Banner is afraid of becoming Banner and resentful of being seen as a monster and used as a weapon.
>Paul Bettany had been told by his agent that he would probably never land a big role again moments before getting a call about playing Vision in Age of Ultron.
>Stark originally said nothing when he snapped Thanos away in Endgame. After test-screenings the Russos felt he needed to have one final line and considered many options before the editor suggested "and I am Iron Man" as a callback to the first movie. Filming Stark's death was difficult for RDJ so he was reluctant to go back to reshoot it at first.
To be fair to him, the "Marvel television empire" that he built was pretty good/decent, to the point that people's biggest complaints was that it wasn't MCU canon.
[x] Plan: For Future Submariners
-[x] [Pseudo-Sequel?] Follow the previous deal; start the movie with Bruce Banner already on the run.
-[x] [Director] Keep Louis Leterrier, you're sure you can come to a compromise somewhere.
