Just the other day—amidst trying to work out exactly how delusional Jeremy Renner’s being with his apparently rock-solid belief that he’ll star in a second season of Hawkeye one of these days—we ran the math on which of the original Avengers from The Avengers had most recently showed up (as their character) in a Marvel project. The answer, unsurprisingly, was Mark Ruffalo, who—not having ever gotten a standalone Hulk movie of his own—has been pretty happy over the years to pop up in other heroes’ films and TV shows, including a 2022 appearance in She-Hulk. It’s a trend that’s set to continue, too, as THR reports today that Ruffalo has signed on to Hulk out in next year’s Spider-Man: Brand New Day.
It’s somewhat surprising news, given that this film—to the extent it’s been described at all—has been mostly discussed as a back-to-basics turn for Tom Holland’s Peter Parker, who was at the center of a whole bunch of reality-hopping/mind-wiping shenanigans in his last cinematic appearance. Now, though, you’ve got the Big Green Rage Monster and Jon Bernthal’s Punisher crowding in, even as we have no basic idea of what Spidey’s going to be doing in the movie. (Although we do have at least one clue, as the same report that included Ruffalo’s casting also notes that Better Call Saul‘s Michael Mando is set to reprise his briefly-glimpsed role as classic Spider-Man villain Scorpion from Spider-Man: Homecoming.)
To be fair, Ruffalo’s casting does play into one of the background themes of the existing Holland Spider-Man movies—i.e., Peter’s endless efforts to audition various dads from amongst the franchise’s heavier hitters. At the same time, though, it runs smack into a version of the MCU that’s struggled to balance the need to set up new characters with the fact that it can’t kill off, like, everybody just because some of the old contracts expired; the fact that the film—scheduled for July 2026—is the last Marvel movie to come out before Joe and Anthony Russo blow up whatever they’re planning to blow up with next December’s Avengers: Doomsday only raises even more question marks about where Hulk and Spidey are going to fit into the haphazardly ongoing narrative.
