New Info on Gray "Berserker" Hulk That Wasn't Used in AVENGERS: AGE OF ULTRON
A few months ago we learned that the gray Hulk was originally supposed to make an appearance in Joss Whedon's Avengers: Age of Ultron. The plan was to have Hulk turn gray when he was under Scarlet Witch’s spell. So during that whole sequence of him fighting Tony Stark in his Hulkbuster armor, Hulk was supposed to be gray. There was no information at the time on why they scrapped those plans, but thanks to an interview with VFX supervisor Christopher Townsend, we have some additional information to share with you.
During an interview with Screen Rant, he explains how far they got into the development process of bringing the gray "berserker" Hulk to life:
"What Joss wanted to do was he said, 'I wanted to have a Hulk that’s this berserker Hulk.' Berserker Hulk was this Hulk that Hulks out, was what we had come up with on set. And then we sort of started talking about, 'Well what are those extremes?' And ILM started playing with a deformed body with a deformed face with one eye larger than another. You know, like crooked teeth, and drooling, and red eyes, and all this kind of stuff.
"Then we started playing with color and we started to de-saturate him and give him sort of red around his eyes and made him look strung-out heroin addict Hulk was the idea. Sort of like where he has totally lost it and he’s gone totally crazy. And then we gradually tended towards a grayer and grayer version till effectively we got gray Hulk."
Sounds like it would have been pretty damn cool! They knew what they wanted to do, but for some reason they decided not to roll with it because they didn't want to confuse the audience. Townsend goes on to say:
"We tried a few shots in the film with that sort of much grayer version. And then we’re thinking, 'Will people confuse this with the gray Hulk from the comics? And is that a good thing or a bad thing?' Eventually, I think we backed off a little bit of that and made him greener so that…we didn’t want to confuse people in creating a new character, per se, in that way. So we ultimately backed off. But we had gone pretty extreme in the looks for him."
Sometimes I don't think filmmakers and studios give the audience enough credit. The audience is smarter than studios think they are. I would have loved to see Hulk go berserker gray in Age of Ultron! I think the audience would have too. Whether or not audience members were familiar with the gray hulk from the comics, I think they would have flipped out over it in a good way.
The concept of the Hulk hulking out to another level just seems like it would have been an amazing sight to see. I think it would have made that incredible battle sequence in the film even more badass. It's a shame that they didn't move forward with it.