Some people online tried to turn it into A Big Thing when Mark Ruffalo compared the MCU to Star Wars, saying that the MCU lets different projects have different voices, while with Star Wars you’re always getting the same thing. I was happy to see that it failed to drum up that much publicity, since it’s a pretty uncontroversial observation: Star Wars is mostly tonally consistent, while the MCU tends to be more experimental with styles and genres.1That all have identical, interchangeable fight and action scenes of people flying around and shooting lasers and punching things. 2Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
That’s most evident with She-Hulk: Attorney at Law. There have been two episodes so far, and the first episode had a training montage, a little bit of comical fighting, and then a climax with exactly one punch. The second had no action scenes. I was impressed that Marvel was unapologetic about making Hawkeye an action-comedy, but She-Hulk seems to have taken that even farther. They’ve gone all-in on being a comedy series.
There are dozens of ways that could’ve gone wrong3And it’s only two episodes in, so it still can, I guess.. I’ve tried reading John Byrne’s She-Hulk comics, but I always bounce off of them, because they’re in a voice that sounds like John Byrne, not like Jennifer Walters. It’s a kind of comedy that’s pretty common in comic books and video games, where it’s written for an extremely specific audience of comic book readers or video game players. (And to be clear, I have 100% been guilty of writing like that!) And the MCU is usually more successful when they try to be wry or clever than outright funny; their attempts at comedy have been inconsistent at best.
But what has been consistent in the MCU is fantastic casting, and that’s most evident in the She-Hulk series. Tatiana Maslany so completely and thoroughly understands the assignment that she manages to make even the clunkiest dialogue4I really didn’t go for the whole “Steve Rogers is a virgin” gag as much as Marvel wanted me to. at least a little charming. This material could very easily have come across as too broad or too try-hard, but she approaches every single scene not as if she were an actor doing comedy in a Marvel series, but as Jennifer Walters. She’s a character that doesn’t take much of what’s going on in that world all that seriously, but still exists completely and totally in that world.
Even when she’s breaking the fourth wall, which is kind of a requirement for She-Hulk at this point, but could have been insufferable if any other actor tried it. It feels like the tone of the show is deliberately broad, but she still manages to seamlessly go in and out of a scene, even ones that seem to be begging for her to mug and wink at the camera.
My favorite example so far: in the second episode, there’s a phone conversation between her and and her cousin, where she’s trying to explain why she’s taking the case of a man who tried to kill him, way back at the start of the MCU.5I’d thought The Incredible Hulk was officially in the MCU, but it’s not on Disney+ at least in the US, so I guess it’s tied up in some kind of rights issue? Mark Ruffalo as Bruce Banner explains that it’s fine, he doesn’t hold any grudges against the guy, and “that was so long ago, I’m a different person. Literally.”
It’s a pretty solid gag, a pretty funny bit of self-awareness aimed at people who’ve been following the MCU on a casual level.6The gag is that Ruffalo’s character was played by Ed Norton in the movie where all of The Abomination’s origin story happened. The scene cuts back to Maslany, who says “Ha!” at the camera before sailing right back into her conversation. And I think she just nailed the delivery: acknowledge it’s a B+/A- gag, and then move on.
It’s not all broad comedy and winking in-jokes. I liked that they cast Cousin Larry as her dad, and he lives completely within a family sitcom, while Steve Coulter as her boss gets a few of the funniest lines delivered completely straight and sour-faced7“I truly do not care who your paralegal is”. And Josh Segarra as “Pug” struck me as instantly hilarious, even though I can’t explain why beyond the fact that every single line delivery sounded like an unnecessarily weird and 100% correct choice. Maslany’s got to play against all of that, matching everybody’s energy to make all these weird shifts in tone flow together, while still nailing her own delivery.
To be honest, when I heard they were casting her as She-Hulk, I thought it sounded like a bit of over-kill. You don’t really need an actor that good to be in what appears to be a light and goofy comedy series. Now after seeing a couple of episodes, I’m realizing I was wrong. Having an actor that good is the key to making it work at all.
I’m a nerd who follows rights issues of the MCU for reasons I suppose, so I can answer the question in Footnote 5: the MCU started as a three studio deal between Paramount, Universal, and what would become Marvel Studios (but started as barely a Production company). Marvel lent Paramount a bag of “lesser known” heroes like Iron Man and Thor, but Universal was already holding cards at the table having held the Hulk rights for a few decades (including the Avi Arad, definitely not in the MCU film). It had to be a multi-studio deal because they wanted to make one or two movies and year and needed the resources of multiple studios (modern Disney must laugh at this a lot, though at the time the MCU movies were a huge risk because Hollywood investors only cared about Batman, Superman, and Hulk), but of course it was also because they knew they were making an Avengers level play and knew they’d need a Hulk (if for no other reason than that investor reason he was the only Marvel character a lot of old Hollywood money knew). Marvel Studios must have played both studios against each other really well to bully Paramount in keeping almost all the rights and using Paramount almost like a grey label studio (because Universal had the Hulk and they only had characters on loan) and also knew that to make a multi-studio operation work and a possible Avengers play a reality they had to negotiate Hulk rights back from Universal, knew they were in a weak position but got rights to Hulk’s appearance in movies where he’s not solo/not the title star.
So yeah, fun long story short Universal still supposedly owns the rights to Hulk solo films (with Marvel Studios approval apparently) and The Incredible Hulk is still much more of a Universal film than say Iron Man was a Paramount film (though their logo is still on it, and I’m sure they still get residuals, but it’s on Disney+ with few complications). Allegedly Universal is steamed that the MCU hasn’t wanted or needed a second solo Hulk film and now that Marvel Studios is fully owned by Disney that be so weirdly awkward and unlike Spider-Man Disney probably doesn’t won’t have a need for a solo Hulk film again. (A lot of those old investors that loved Hulk because of the 70s TV show aged out, died, or retired, including the MCU’s own Producer Perlmutter.)
I find these multi-studio dynamics fascinating because there is no movie project in history and unlikely to be one again that has touched so many different studios among its movies with Paramount, Universal, Sony, and Disney.
That is interesting! I thought the licensing tie-ups were all with Sony and Fox, and didn’t even know Universal was involved outside of the theme parks. I’ve heard several times just how much was riding on Iron-Man, but it’s hard to appreciate until you’re reminded of the state Marvel was in back then!