Marvel wanted to play up Mark Ruffalo's character Hulk in "Avengers: Age of Ultron," and in fact, the studio's Industrial Light & Magic (ILM) special effects team even made an effort to turn the green monster grey during the scene when Scarlet Witch (Elizabeth Olsen) was playing with his mind.
Visual effects supervisor Christopher Townsend told Screen Rant that director Joss Whedon already had the scene in mind, and they went as far as turning the character grey and shooting some scenes. However, they decided to do away with in the end so as not to confuse audiences.
"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," Townsend shared. "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," he continued. "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."
The ILM managed to get the look down pat, and they were pretty excited to shoot the grey version of Hulk. But when they started considering the audiences' point of view, they came to the conclusion that a different shade of Hulk might only appear as a new character, so they reverted back to the original plan.
"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," he said.
Originally, Ruffalo's Hulk was included in the next Marvel film "Captain America: Civil War," but now it looks like his character will not be making a cameo. He might be seen next in the final two "Avengers" films, which have already been entitled "Avengers: Infinity Wars Part 1 and 2."
