2008’s Incredible Hulk did everything right with Hulk, and the MCU threw it away

polygon.com:

2008’s The Incredible Hulk was by no means a failure. It more than made back its budget, and it scored a Metacritic rating that lands it comfortably in the “not great, but not bad” category. It was, however, quickly discarded from the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Edward Norton’s take on Marvel’s Green Mean Machine was retconned away, with Mark Ruffalo replacing him and doing a very different take on Hulk. Most of The Incredible Hulk was reduced to a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cameo in 2012’s The Avengers.

But around 2021, the Norton movie became relevant again as Disney started incorporating elements from the film back into the MCU continuity, starting with Tim Roth returning as Emil Blonsky, aka Abomination, in a cameo in Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings,and later as a guest star on She-Hulk: Attorney at Law.

Establishing stronger ties between earlier and later takes on the MCU Hulk felt especially significant with She-Hulk, a series that seemed to bring Bruce Banner’s story to an end so he could pass the torch on to his cousin. After a bunch of movies where Ruffalo’s character rampaged as just Banner, just Hulk, and a mix of the two in the form of Professor Hulk (Bruce’s mind in Hulk’s body, a hybrid who debuted in Avengers: Endgame), it really felt like that character’s potential had been fully tapped. So it made sense to clear the stage for a whole new Hulk. Not just a female take on the character, but also a more comedic one: The comic book She-Hulk was basically the original Deadpool, complete with fourth-wall-breaking jokes.

But the potential for the MCU Hulk is far from depleted. There are still so many things the writers of Marvel blockbusters haven’t done with him. And the foundations were already laid