Abomination and She-Hulk’s final scene make Marvel’s least loved film weirdly relevant

polygon.com:

It’s been a wild 18 months for the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Not only has the multi-billion-dollar franchise expanded into TV, but it’s started to use the medium to recontextualize the films that built its empire in the first place. And no series has done more work in that regard than She-Hulk: Attorney at Law, which sets one of the oldest MCU supervillains back on the board.

It’s a clear sign that Louis Leterrier’s much maligned 2008 movie The Incredible Hulk is back in the forefront of the MCU.

[Ed. note: This piece contains spoilers for She-Hulk: Attorney at Law episode 9.]

She-Hulk’s finale episode may have poked fun at a lot of Marvel tradition, but it kept one going: a mid-credits scene, one in which Wong, the Sorcerer Supreme, freed Emil Blonsky, the Abomination, from jail and created one more dangling plot line that any future Marvel project could pick up.

And Emil Blonsky isn’t the only villain from The Incredible Hulk whose revival has become a part of the modern MCU — weaving a movie that was barely considered a part of Marvel’s multiverse firmly into the tapestry.

Released in the shadow of the game-changing Iron Man, it’s not hard to understand whyThe Incredible Hulk has long been lost in the doldrums of the MCU’s Phase One. Though it aligned the MCU’s version of the Hulk closer to the comics than Ang Lee’s 2003 Hulk movie, it also played it relatively safe. The movie introduces Bruce Banner (Edward Norton) already hulked, and already on the run. He faces off against classic Hulk antagonists Thunderbolt Ross (William Hurt) and the Abomination (Tim Roth), and we meet his lifelong comic book love, Betty Ross (Liv Tyler), who drives Bruce to control the monster within.

With the 20-plus MCU movies that