Part of what made Avengers: Endgame work was the considerable amount of emotional energy dedicated to the original cohort of heroes. But whereas Tony Stark, Steve Rogers, Natasha Romanoff, Clint Barton and Thor got great wrap ups for their stories, Bruce Banner was given the red-headed step child of character arcs.
The Russo brothers decided to finally address the green elephant in the room by explaining (via Wired) why Bruce/Hulk got the short end of the narrative stick in Endgame and their answer was… well, it wasn’t great.
To recap Bruce’s Endgame character arc, he merges with Hulk to become Professor Brulk – which is explained away with two minutes of expository dialogue – he explains time travel to everyone, he snaps the dusted back into existence aaaand that’s it basically. Pretty lame to be brutally honest.
But rather than dig into why they gave Bruce the story he got, the Russo brothers copped out of giving a substantial answer by simply regurgitating what we already saw in Endgame. No explanation of why we didn’t get any footage for Bruce and Hulk merging. Nothing.
Look, it’s fair enough that not everyone could get enough screentime in Endgame given how it clocks in at a bladder-bursting 3 hours, but Bruce/Hulk’s character arc (if you want to call it that) could’ve been given more just than a lame scene set in a diner where he explains what happened.
Even a short flashback into how Bruce merged with Hulk would’ve gone a long way in servicing the character’s arc, which ultimately amounted to “oh hey, only I can wear the Infinity Gauntlet and survive”. The movie is already 3 hours long, what’s another extra couple of minutes?
And it’s not like Marvel could save Bruce’s character arc for a standalone film because that’s next to impossible due to a mindboggling rights issue, so there’s no real reason to hold any material back.
Ah well, we’re just going to have to settle for what we got with Bruce/Hulk in Endgame. But hey at least we got to see what happens when Hulk got Bruce’s intellect and it proved to be quite an entertaining – if emotionally unsatisfying – ride in the end.