In the summer of 2002, producer and screenwriter James Schamus went to Times Square to see Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man. Schamus, a frequent collaborator with director Ang Lee, went for two reasons: to celebrate the star-making moment of Tobey Maguire, with whom Lee and Schamus worked on The Ice Storm; and to “scope out what was going in Marvel-land”. Lee and Schamus were deep into production on Hulk, a rival superhero smackdown now marking its 20th anniversary.
Hulk – which starred Eric Bana as Bruce Banner, the scientist with severe anger management issues – had been more than a decade in development. These were the old times, before the Marvel Cinematic Universe had taken over – when Marvel’s top-billed characters were in the hands of other studios, and filmmakers were scrambling to figure out the formula of blockbuster cinema’s hot new trend.
