In June 2008, just a month after Iron Man launched the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the second chapter of this superhero franchise unfolded with The Incredible Hulk. The Marvel movie saw Tim Roth’s Emil Blonsky injected with a different variation of the Super Soldier Serum to combat Edward Norton’s Bruce Banner in his monstrous form, and then later getting a transfusion of Banner’s blood to become The Abomination. Ultimately Hulk managed to vanquish Abomination, but while speaking with CinemaBlend, Roth shared that there was originally going to be more shown regarding his character’s fate at the end of The Incredible Hulk.
When we last saw Blonsky/Abomination in The Incredible Hulk, he was laying defeated on the ground, with the military arriving to take him into custody. During his conversation with our own Sean O’Connell on behalf of his reprisal as Blonsky in She-Hulk: Attorney at Law, Tim Roth revealed that the way the movie’s original ending was conceived, he would have been tossed into a special kind of prison. As Roth recalled:
Their original idea was that I was in a... they locked my character in a safe, and put him to the bottom of the ocean and left him there. And that's how they thought if there was ever gonna be a second one, you'd find him in that. And he'd be pissed. So that was that, but he'd been waiting. So in a way, that's kind of what they did [for She-Hulk]. They put him in maximum security isolation. They put him in a bubble. They let him stew.
Although Abomination was said to be incarcerated in a cryo-cell at The Vault during a Season 1 episode of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (whether that show counts as part of the official MCU canon is debatable), had The Incredible Hulk’s original ending been brought to life, we would seen him brimming with rage at the bottom of the ocean. That’s certainly an effective way to ensure that Abomination is kept away from the general public and leave him brimming with rage until we picked back up with him in The Incredible Hulk 2. When Sean O’Connell asked Tim Roth to elaborate on this moment, the actor responded:
That was what I remember, talking to Kevin [Feige] on set, when we were doing the original [Hulk]. They dropped him in a steel box, welded him in, and left him. That was the idea. And when he comes out of that, there's a price to pay. And I think it was with Stan Lee, as well. We talked about it with him.
Alas, given the complications surrounding the Hulk film rights between Marvel Studios and Universal Pictures, The Incredible Hulk 2 never happened, and these days, Bruce Banner, now being played by Mark Ruffalo, serve as either an ensemble player in Avengers movies or a supporting character in projects led by other protagonists. However, as Tim Roth noted, we eventually did get to see Emil Blonsy in a maximum security prison thanks to She-Hulk: Attorney at Law, though this is a land-based facility run by the Department of Damage Control. Between that or an underwater box, Blonsky’s lucky he ended up in the former.
After being absent from the MCU for over a decade, Abomination made his big return in Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, with the character, who now looks more like his comic book counterpart, battling Wong at the Macau fight club. Tim Roth provided vocals for Abomination’s Shang-Chi appearance, but She-Hulk: Attorney at Law marks him fully reprising the character since The Incredible Hulk, and unlike Emil Blonsky in the comics, the MCU’s Blonsky is able to switch between forms. I won’t share any She-Hulk spoilers here other than to say that Blonsky has a different perspective on life compared to his attitude in The Incredible Hulk.
New episodes of She-Hulk: Attorney at Law drop Thursdays to Disney+ subscribers, who also have access to most of the other MCU movies. The Incredible Hulk, however, is not one of them, and you’ll need an HBO Max subscription to stream it.
