With Thor: Ragnarok looking like the best comic book-inspired psychedelic space adventure since Doctor Strange (it hasn’t been too long), now is the time to talk about the ending of Avengers: Age of Ultron, and how that’s been officially changed by Marvel head Kevin Feige. In other words: Spoilers below.
Age of Ultron ends with the Avengers mostly victorious, but with a few casualties. Black Widow, the only person who can really talk Hulk down, gets snubbed by the Green Meanie as he uses one of S.H.I.E.L.D.’s quinjets to fly off, far away from those who appreciate his bulkiness. Nick Fury says jokingly that he’ll send a postcard from Fiji after losing signal of the craft near the “Caspian Sea.” The reason for grounding Hulk’s exit as “earthbound,” according to Feige, was to keep fans from thinking that Marvel Studios would be doing a Planet Hulk movie. But with Thor: Ragnarok turning out to be an interstellar buddy movie starring Hulk, Ultron has been retconned.
In an interview with The Wrap, Feige explains his conversations with Joss Whedon in avoiding the whole Hulk in Space thing, and how they went forward to end up doing a Hulk in Space movie anyway.
“The way it ends as you recall with Hulk in the Quinjet going off, right? We said, ‘Joss, we can’t do that because he’s not going into space and people are going to think we’re doing ‘Planet Hulk,’ He goes, ‘Well, what are you going to do?’ We said, ‘We don’t know.’ So, if you go back and look at that shot of the movie, he’s in the sky. It’s blue sky.”
Feige’s about-face came quickly as Marvel tried to decide which “big” character could make Thor: Ragnarok an important chapter in the MCU’s Phase Three.
“Well, what if he did go to space? We would jokily call it Planet Thor, for a while. I went, ‘You know what that means?’ They go, ‘What?’ I go, ‘That means Hulk went to space at the end of Ultron.’ So, I had to tell Joss. And this was a year after Ultron came out. It was kind of a big thing. We were like, ‘You gotta change it, Joss, he’s not going to space.’ A year after, I go, ‘Joss, guess where he’s going? He’s going to space.’”
This doesn’t mean they’ll go back and re-release Ultron just to show Hulk heading into the black of space instead of the clear blue skies of Fiji, but it would be nice if they did, just so we don’t have to explain what happened to people on the couch next to us who probably aren’t keeping up with the minutia of this ever-expanding universe.