How Marvel Retconned Incredible Hulk’s Post-Credits Scene (2025)

The June 2008 Marvel Studios title The Incredible Hulk occupies a strange place in the Marvel Cinematic Universe landscape, and the same can be said for its post-credits scene. As for the film itself, though, it's the lowest-grossing title in the studios' catalog at the box office (it's the only MCU feature to make under $150 million domestically), it's also the only MCU appearance of Bruce Banner/Hulk where he's played by Edward Norton rather than Mark Ruffalo. Because of these problems, this means The Incredible Hulk occupies a much more low-profile spot in the MCU canon compared to, say, The Avengers.

However, that doesn't mean the project hasn't gotten referenced in subsequent projects, with William Hurt's The Incredible Hulk character General Thunderbolt Ross making multiple recent MCU appearances, including in the forthcoming MCU filmBlack Widow.The film's connection to the broader Marvel Cinematic Universe was even cemented as early as the aforementionedThe Incredible Hulk'simprovised post-credits scene(which, unlike every other MCU title, actually played just before the credits), which featured an appearance by Robert Downey Jr. as Tony Stark.

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It's a scene depicting a meeting between Hurt's Ross and Downey Jr's Tony Stark in a dimly-lit tavern, one which ends with Stark asking Ross what his feelings would be if he told the general that he was putting some kind of team together. Obviously a tease for the then-forthcoming Avengers movie, it's a scene that cemented The Incredible Hulk as taking place in a larger universe, but it provided obvious continuity issues once subsequent movies came to fruition. The most pressing of these issues being why Stark would be sent to recruit people for The Avengers after the events of Iron Man 2 (which take place before The Incredible Hulk) made it clear S.H.I.E.L.D. saw Stark as too much of a liability to be involved with The Avengers.

An attempt to rectify this issue and other continuity quibbles manifested in the 2011 short film The Consultant, one of the entries in Marvel's short-lived series of Marvel One-Shotshort films. This short saw Agent Phil Coulson (Clark Gregg) and Agent Jasper Sitwell (Maximiliano Hernandez) engaging in a series of conversations that provided greater context to this Tony Stark/Thunderbolt Ross conversation. Specifically, it was revealed a volatile personality like Stark being sent on a recruitment mission was the whole point. A retcon was established that Ross wanted Emil Blonsky's Abomination (the villain of The Incredible Hulk) to join the Avengers rather than remain in prison.

S.H.I.E.L.D., not wanting Blonsky to be released onto the public, decided to send Stark to be as off-putting as possible in the hopes of tainting the idea of the Avengers team for Ross. The plan works, Stark proved to be such an off-putting person to Ross that Blonsky is guaranteed to stay in a jail cell rather than become a superhero. The whole crux of this stripped-down short film (which consists of archival footage from The Incredible Hulk as well as new footage of Gregg and Hernandez in a diner) was a convoluted way of getting around continuity issues found in one of Marvel Studios' earliest movies. Its primary legacy is serving as another example of how Marvel's been grappling with incorporating The Incredible Hulk into the larger Marvel Cinematic Universe.

NEXT: Why Did Marvel Stop Making One-Shots?