The Incredible Hulk director Louis Leterrier had a “whole sequel” planned for the 2008 Edward Norton-starrer film, he revealed in an interview with Chris Killian for Comicbook.com recently.

“There was like Grey Hulk, Red Hulks — there was a lot of good stuff that we were planning,” he said, talking about the envisioned sequel that would have unravelled other important aspects of the Marvel character.

The sequel, however, was dropped following Disney’s acquisition of Marvel Studios in 2009.

Following Edward Norton-starrer The Incredible Hulk, actor Mark Ruffalo took on the role of Bruce Banner/Hulk in MCU movies, beginning with The Avengers in 2012. The storyline from the 2008 film did not form a part of the character's arc in the subsequent films.

Before Disney's acquisition of Marvel Studios in 2009, Universal Pictures held the distribution rights to any standalone Hulk movies. The last standalone Hulk movie was The Incredible Hulk, following which Ruffalo's Hulk only made appearances in other Marvel films, such as the Avengers movies, Iron Man 3, Thor: Ragnarok, Captain Marvel, Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, and numerous others, including the Disney+ series She-Hulk: Attorney at Law.

Leterrier said that the sequel would have included Bruce Banner's alter ego, the Grey Hulk, as well as multiple Red Hulks. However, the MCU didn't explore the Hulk's story after the 2008 film until the introduction of She-Hulk in 2022.

"Hulk is a complex character within the Marvel Universe… You want the primaeval Hulk... the rage Hulk. And then when you go Grey Hulk and Smart Hulk you lose that a little bit and you get a little bit more kiddish with it," Leterrier said.

The filmmaker said that in the current state of the MCU, the character has deviated “far from” what he had initially intended to develop in sequels. While he aimed to explore the consciousness of Hulk and his characteristics, he said that there was pressure from the other end to include numerous other characters in a short span of time.