The following story is going to touch on spoilers from the first episode of She-Hulk, so stop reading now if you haven’t yet seen it, and still want to stay unspoiled.
The Marvel television shows that appear on Disney+ have no issues making changes to the origin stories of the heroes featured, whether it be mentioning the word “mutation” for Kamala Khan (Iman Velani) or putting young Kate Bishop (Hailee Steinfeld) at the site of the Battle of New York, thereby explaining her infatuation with Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner). A similar change is made to explain how attorney Jennifer Walters (Tatiana Maslany) ends up with her cousin Brice Banner’s gamma-radiated blood in her own bloodstream in She-Hulk, and it involves… a spaceship?
Most of the early origin stories for She-Hulk have her receiving a vital blood transfusion from her cousin Bruce (Mark Ruffalo), thereby explaining how she becomes a Hulk, herself. In the new Disney+ show She-Hulk, Jennifer Walters and Bruce Banner are driving along in a car when they are confronted by an alien spacecraft that causes them to swerve off of the road and crash. It looks like this.
When Jen wakes up following the crash, she is in an island laboratory that Tony Stark built for Bruce so he could continue to conduct experiments on himself. She asks Bruce about the ship, and he replies:
Yeah. Sakaarian Class A Courier Craft. They’re probably trying to deliver a message. I gotta get to the bottom of that. You know, weird stuff just kind of finds you when you’re a Hulk.
Sakaar, as you may remember, is the garbage planet on which Hulk was hiding (and fighting) when Thor (Chris Hemsworth) discovered him in Thor: Ragnarok. The people of Sakaar worshipped Hulk, so we were curious what that message might have been. During a She-Hulk press day, we posed the question to director Kat Coiro if that ship will be important later in the series, and she confirmed:
It’s tied into the narrative of our series, but it also lends itself to future projects.
There’s something that will happen later on in She-Hulk (in an episode you haven’t seen yet) that clarifies a little bit more about how Hulk responds to the ship arriving on Earth. But as for a future project that it might be setting up… your guess is as good as our. The rumors surrounding Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo) lately have been that it’s finally time to make a World War Hulk adaptation. Because as of right now, when you scan the landscape of Upcoming Marvel Movies, there aren’t any places that we expect Hulk to show up, unless it’s one of the two announced Avengers movies.
We are only one episode into She-Hulk, which is episodic in nature and runs for eight total episodes. It will include the return of Abomination (Tim Roth), the presence of Wong (Benedict Wong), and a cameo by the Man Without Fear himself. Should get exciting!
