Josh Lucas Has “Nothing But Respect” For Ang Lee’s Hulk

It seems hard to believe, but there was a time when putting a Marvel character on the big screen didn’t automatically mean that you would reach box office gold. The early superhero movies are filled with creative decisions ranging from absolute genius [Patrick Stewart as Charles Xavier] to utterly baffling [that cape in Spawn looks terrible]. Even the 1-2-3 punch of Blade, X-Men, and Spider-Man didn’t suddenly mean that everyone knew how to make these movies well. In terms of something that fell well under the “utterly baffling” decision-making camp, you don’t need to look any further than Ang Lee’s Hulk, which was released in 2003.

Hulk Made No Sense In 2003

A Hulk in the 90s is like what Deadpool would become in the 2000s: it was sitting in development hell for years. The movie first began a stage of development way back in 1990. There was a planned movie that nearly got off the ground in the late 90s, but it wasn’t until early 2001 that Lee came on board, and the ball got rolling. Producer James Schamus revealed years later that he thought the movie was in trouble after he saw Spider-Man in theaters, but the film was released anyway. One of the people that played a role in that film is Josh Lucas, who currently has a role on the insanely popular Yellowstone, and recently spoke to The Playlist. Lucas was asked about Lee’s adaptation of the character and shared that he thinks the movie was ahead of its time in terms of technology and has “nothing but respect for it.”

“If people ask me who my favorite directors are, I almost invariably will tell you my number one is Ang [Lee],” Lucas shared. “I don’t use this word genius, but I think he’s truly up there as a, if not brilliant, genius filmmaker. Like you say, he was swinging for the rafters on [‘Hulk’]. I don’t think the technology was quite where his brain was. And if you look at what he did with ‘Life of Pi,’ he was able to hit it out of the park. I think the technology evolved, and he’s one of the people who pushed the technology to evolve. I know he was pushing the team of people who were on the CGI of ‘Hulk’ to make something that, technically, maybe wasn’t capable of being at the level he wanted it yet. And so I think he was very frustrated with that movie by not being able to get what he wanted and what was in his brain. But I also agree with you, the way he was morphing, the way pages were flipping. I mean, he was creating a visual comic book. And I haven’t seen anybody do it quite the same way he was doing it – think about it, that’s twenty years ago, right? So, there’s an incredible auteur filmmaker beneath this monster, an early Marvel movie. I have nothing but respect for it.”

How you feel about Hulk in 2023 depends on the person, but there is no denying that the film had an impact. The film that would become The Incredible Hulk and the second Marvel Cinematic Universe film was initially a sequel to the 2003 film that was repurposed as a reboot. Hulk also made over $245 million at the worldwide box office on a budget of $137 million. While that might seem like chump change these days, it was enough to make it one of the highest-grossing films of 2003. We learn from the mistakes and successes of the past, and Hulk certainly has lessons worth teaching, no matter what you think of the film’s quality.