Fans Are All Saying The Same Thing About Liv Tyler’s Return To The MCU In Captain America 4

While Mark Ruffalo’s Incredible Hulk has become an important part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the fact that the only standalone Hulk movie in the MCU was one of the franchise's rare misses meant that those storylines and characters got left behind, and seemingly forgotten. But in recent years we’ve seen some of them come back, and now we knowLiv Tyler will be back as Betty Ross, marking at least the third character fromThe Incredible Hulkto return…in a Captain America movie?

It was one thing when we learned thatTim Blake Nelson would be returninginCaptain America: New World Orderto reprise his role from the Hulk film and take his place as The Leader, a sequel tease from the second-ever MCU movie that never went anywhere. Then we learned that thenewly recast Thunderbolt Ross, which sees Harrison Ford takeover afterthe death of William Hurt, would also appear. And now Liv Tyler is back. So fans have one question: Is this actually a secret Hulk movie? As one person shared onTwitter:

While Disney no has the rights to nearly all Marvel characters收购后的狐狸, there are still a couple of heroes outstanding. Sony still has the rights to Spider-Man, and the two studios have agreed to work together on those projects, but Marvel doesn’t have a similar deal withUniversal Pictures, with whom they share the rights to Hulk. Marvel can make movies that Hulk is in, but they can’t make Hulk movies without Universal.

And it seems to a lot of fans like Marvel might be trying a weird end run to make a Hulk movie without calling it that. While Mark Ruffalo himself is not currently confirmed to be part of the cast ofCaptain America: New World Order, there are a lot of other characters from that original movie that now are, and it just seems odd that they all will be returning in a different corner of the franchise.

All the news that we’re hearing about the newCaptain Americamovie has to do with these Hulk characters and as such Anthony Mackie’s Sam Wilson is starting to feel like an afterthought in what is supposed to be the character’sbig-screen debut as the new Captain America. One certainly hopes he won’t really be overshadowed in his own story.

Of course, even in the comics, there were lots of times when a hero would take on a villain that was generally associated with a different hero, and that seems to be the sort of thing that we’re looking at here. The title of the new movie itself has a very political bent, and that’s very much the purview of Captain America more than the Incredible Hulk, so in the end we should expect this will still be a Captain America movie. Still, asCinemaBlend's own Eric Swannpoints out, if we're bringing back characters fromThe Incredible Hulk, let's just go all out.

Captain America: New World Orderis still more than two years away, so there’s likely a lot more about the film that we will learn as production gets underway, which is likely to be happening very soon. Fans who have wondered what happened to characters like The Leader or Betty Ross will find out soon, and even if they don’t cross paths with the Hulk here, perhaps the new Captain America movie will set up that possibility down the road.