What Went Wrong with the Hulk 2003 Movie

We discuss what went wrong with the 2003 Hulk movie.

In 2003 Hulk debuted. It was directed by Ang Lee  and starred Eric Bana  as Bruce Banner/Hulk, alongside Jennifer Connelly, Sam Elliott, Josh Lucas, and Nick Nolte

Possible spoilers, in case you haven’t seen it.

Eric Bana commented that the shoot was "Ridiculously serious... a silent set, morbid in a lot of ways." Lee told him that he was shooting a Greek tragedy:

The film was released on June 20, 2003, and it grossed $245 million worldwide.

The movie made 62.1 million dollars on opening weekend. At the time that was the 16th biggest opening ever. Unfortunately, for  the movie it dropped 70 percent the next weekend. It had a budget of 137 million. If it wasn’t for the addition of the world wide box office the movie would have tanked completely. It became the largest opener at the time to not earn at least 150 million dollars at the box office.

The box office tells you something went wrong with this movie. It’s obvious that word of mouth killed the Hulk movie in 2003 after it’s first weekend. For better perspective the number one film that year, “The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King” made a little over a billion dollars worldwide that year. The tenth biggest movie Bad Boys 2 made 273 million dollars worldwide that year. A year before Spider-man had made 825 million dollars worldwide and the X-men had made 296 million worldwide on the their first big screen appearance in 2000.

So what went wrong? The movie started with a lot of promise. People were excited to see the Hulk again. We hadn’t seen the Hulk on any kind of screen since the 1990 Death of the Hulk TV movie with Bill Bixby and Lou Ferrigno. I know I was excited. Plus, you had lots of comic book fans built up over the years that were excited to see a big screen high budget version of the Hulk. Me included.

So how far did the movie stray from expectations? Well, I think the first thing we have to say is that the Hulk movie feels like a movie made by film making professionals who were intent on stylish expression and not really fans of the source material. I think there should be a rule that at least one person or more in charge of the direction a film takes is a true fan of the source material so as not to miss the spirit of the character and story being presented.

I thought the split-screen technique used on the film to mimic comic book page panels was distracting at times and made it difficult to follow. 

Rotten Tomatoes' critical consensus calls it an ambitious and stylish film that focuses too much on dialogue at the cost of action. Well, you know that best sums up this film’s problems if you had to do so in one sentence.

It’s slow, and not enough Hulk Smash action, but most of the action scenes we got were great. The action scenes where the Hulk fights the military were awesome! I can’t say the say the same for the climatic battle. My biggest gripe is that the scene was shot too dark to really tell what the heck is going on. That and it’s a little weird and would be hard to get even with good lighting. Why was Banner’s Dad the villain of the story basically the Absorbing Man. A great character on his own right and one that really gave the Hulk a run for his money in a few comic stories especially issue 261 where you feel like he came so close to killing the Hulk or at least Banner. It wasn’t for the claustrophobic at heart. If anything David Banner the father and villain of the movie should have turned into an old Hulk. 

This brings me to another thing. I think instead of showing us Banner’s disturbing childhood right off the bat…his dad murders his mom when Bruce was a child. Instead of going all deeply dark, I think they should have focused on making Bruce a more of a everyday guy and worked on getting the audience to relate to him and then maybe brought in the evil dad angle a movie or two later to heighten the drama. It was too much too fast.

And what is the deal with the experiments at the front of the movie leading up to the Hulk’s transformation with starfish and lizards. It’s like they were almost mixing the Hulk’s origin with that of Spider-man villain the Lizard Curt Connors. 

The movie as a whole focuses on the Hulk’s origins and here is where they missed it the most. During the movie we see a gamma bomb explosion go off once or twice in the background, but it has nothing really to do with the Hulk’s origin in this movie. It’s like it was there to be an easter egg or something, but fails in my mind because they didn’t even connect a gamma bomb directly to the Hulk’s origin. 

This has always bugged me about this movie. Why didn’t they use the gamma bomb explosion in the Hulk’s origin? It makes little sense. You have a big budget Hulk movie, you can finally show us the origin as it was presented in the comics and they wind up having Banner jump on some funky looking Gamma Machine to save a friend vs throwing Rick Jones in a ditch before getting blasted by a Gamma Bomb.

If you really want to get a sense of what it should have looked at, you have to see the 80’s Hulk cartoon version. That cartoon was more cinematic in it’s feel than the 2003 Hulk movie. They should have used it as a blueprint for the story structure and the Bill Bixby series for the heart and soul of the Hulk.

I think the trick to any superhero movie is that you got to make the main character as relatable to the average guy as you can. Bill Bixby played a smart yet very human Banner. He was a real person in a sense of his portrayal. When things got so bad that the dude cried on screen you believed it was real and you knew it was going to go from sadness into mindless rage any second. 

Eric Bana is a good actor. Don’t get me wrong. I think he was probably following the director’s guidance in his portrayal, but his scripted portrayal lacked nuance. He played Banner like he was a psycho barely hanging on to humanity at times. He even reaches out to choke Betty Ross his girlfriend at one point for a second before he gathers himself. Got to blame the writers for that most likely, but TV Banner would have never done that, that I remember. If you want to see Bana in a one of his better roles watch The Time Traveler’s Wife. It’s been a while since I’ve seen it, but I seem to remember it being a decent movie, but be warned it’s not a very happy movie. I’ll leave it at that.

The effects in this movie were good, but I can’t help wonder if they shouldn’t have mixed cgi with a real life body builder like Lou Ferrigno. Heck, they had Lou do a guest appearance  and he still looked pretty big then from what I could. He does a cameo as a security guard walking alongside Stan Lee in the movie.

I think they used cgi along with a body suit to bring the Thing to life in the first two Fantastic Four movies. I remember talking to a older guy who worked out at my gym that said the Hulk movie gave him a headache that he blamed on the cgi. 

I remember really wanting to like this movie when it first came out, and I probably didn’t hate it actually, but over the years I can definitely see where so many opportunities were missed and I said before, probably because there was a lack of having fans involved in the process. I mean who knows better what they want to see than the fans themselves.

Parts that I enjoyed as I recently rewatched this movie were most of the scenes with Sam Elliot as General Thunderbolt Ross. He came across as one realistic bad dude, a man that had been hardened by years of wars an service to his country. He was the only character I felt came across as truly authentic. 

The music by Danny Elfman was just right as it perfectly alluded to classic TV show musical theme, however, I have to say they could have added some of the 80’s cartoon theme music to the action scenes and it would have been great.

Well, the next Hulk movie to come out upped the action. I may have to rewatch that one again soon and pick it apart for the good and the bad. It only grossed $264.8 in 2008 making it one of the lowest grossing MCU films ever, and I’m sorry to say that the first Hulk film in 2003 has to keep people from coming to see it. Typically, the performance of a sequel is only going to be as good as the response to the last movie to come before it.