Though he had to pass on his chance to direct The Hobbit, Guillermo del Toro is still well on his way to putting his stamp on every other major cultural icon from the last 40 years or so. Next up, believe it or not, is the Incredible Hulk, who will be the star of a new TV series in the works at ABC. According to Deadline del Toro is teaming up with Battlestar Galactica executive producer David Eick to create the series, which will be the first TV collaboration between Marvel TV and ABC since Marvel joined the Disney parent company fold.
The idea is for the series to be an origin story, which is a little goofy given that there have been two Hulk origin story movies in the last decade, but I suppose you've got to start somewhere to bring in TV audiences. Here's the best part, and something we can probably credit del Toro with: the character of the Hulk will be a mix of CGI and prosthetic puppetry, much like many of the best characters in del Toro's previous films. Del Toro and Eick will come up with the pilot story themselves, with Eick set to write and del Toro considering directing, though given how much else he has on his plate, he'd have to do some serious rearranging to make time for that.
The project is in the very early stages, so the show probably won't be ready to air until after The Avengers--featuring Mark Ruffalo as the Hulk-- hits theaters in July of 2012. I've been widely predicting that the superhero genre will have played itself out by then, but given that an Incredible Hulk TV series predates this whole trend by a few decades, maybe a new version can outlast it too.
