You owe yourself an Incredible Hulk rewatch before Captain America: Brave New World

Captain America: Brave New World is the 35th film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, which means that if Marvel wants to keep up the kind of callbacks and returning characters its recent movies are so fond of, the series would have to plumb its deepest trenches of continuity for unexplored territory. But even bearing that in mind, it’s still surprising that the single most important movie to revisit before Brave New World is 2008’s The Incredible Hulk — the movie that only sort of barely counts as part of the MCU. If you, like many of the rest of us, haven’t rewatched that movie since the lead-up to Avengers: Endgame, now’s the time to revisit it. 

[Ed. note: This post DOES NOT contain spoilers for Captain America: Brave New World, and only discusses plot points revealed in the trailers and previously announced members of the cast.]

As you likely know from the trailers, Brave New World features quite a bit of political intrigue, mostly centered around Thaddeus “Thunderbolt” Ross (Harrison Ford, taking over from previous actor William Hurt, who died in 2022.) In the new movie, Ross has recently been elected president of the United States. While he’s been floating around the MCU for a while now, popping up as a major political figure in films like Captain America: Civil War or Avengers: Infinity War, the most important things to know about him come from his humbler beginnings. 

In The Incredible Hulk, Ross is a lowly U.S. Army general who’s intent on recreating the military’s World War II-era super-soldier program using gamma radiation, which accidentally turns Bruce Banner (Edward Norton) into the Hulk. Ross then tries to hunt down the monster he created, infuriating his daughter Betty (Liv Tyler), who’s in love with Bruce. 

Marvel announced back in 2022 that Tim Blake Nelson would be reprising his role as Samuel Sterns from The Incredible Hulk in Brave New World. For those who don’t remember, Sterns spends a bit of time trying to help cure Bruce’s gamma-related affliction, but he’s taken hostage and exposed to Bruce’s tainted blood by Emil Blonsky (Tim Roth), who eventually becomes Abomination.

But while all this plot summary is nice to have going into Brave New World, so you can remember who’s important and why, it doesn’t really capture one simple, important fact about 2008’s The Incredible Hulk: It’s actually a pretty good movie, despite what its lack of sequels might suggest. Beyond any plot specifics or tie-ins to Brave New World, that’s the best reason to give this movie another watch.

The Incredible Hulk is a superhero movie from an entirely different time than the superhero-movie era we’ve been living through since 2011. It’s quaint, small, and totally unburdened by the pressures of continuity, multiverses, Infinity Stones, or even sequels. That’s awfully refreshing to experience in a blockbuster, and a welcome palate-cleanser from the MCU’s recent past. The action, as presented by The Transporter director Louis Leterrier, is more interesting and wacky than anything the MCU has allowed Hulk to participate in since Thor: Ragnarok. And Edward Norton’s version of Bruce Banner is moody, tortured, and wonderfully out of step with the MCU’s usual archetype. 

All these little anachronisms make The Incredible Hulk feel like a superhero movie transported here from a different galaxy. It’s a brief, beautiful little portal back into a time when MCU movies didn’t all feel quite so similar to each other, and didn’t look like they were originally supposed to be shunted to Disney Plus. That alone should be reason enough to give the movie another watch. But the fact that it will also help you get ready for the rush of names Captain America: Brave New World is going to throw at you is just a helpful added bonus.

The Incredible Hulk is streaming on Disney Plus, and is available for rental or purchase on Amazon, Fandango, and other digital platforms.