marvel cinematic universe - Is the 2008 version of The Incredible Hulk meant to be a spiritual sequel to the 2003 version? - Movies & TV

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In 2003 href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0286716/">Hulk
was released to theatres with very unfavorable reviews and the director even calling it
a financial failure.

Due in part to
this failure they rebooted the franchise only 5 years later in 2008's href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0800080/">The Incredible
Hulk Which would go on to receive much praise and be a part of
The
Avengers universe.

My
question is this. While it says on href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hulk_%28film%29#Reboot">Wikipedia that
this new Hulk is meant to be standalone, did the production team have any intention of
becoming a sequel to the 2003 film in an capacity? Whether it be in writing, story
elements, plot, etc? Or was a decision made quickly to try to have as little to do with
the 2003 version as possible?

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class="normal">Answer

I remember
reading that Edward Norton did a major rewrite of the original script that was presented
to him. On digging a bit, href="http://www.slashfilm.com/the-truth-about-edward-norton-vs-marvel/"
rel="noreferrer">I found this interesting article, this is an interesting
snippet from the article:

Leterrier told Collider that 70 minutes of deleted footage is set to

be released on the inevitable Bluray release. (Leterrier describes
the

out-takes: “It’s like the back story. It’s more the
sequel to the Ang
Lee
movie.”)

Basically,
Norton had written a lot of dialogue, conversations, etc. to give the character more
depth - but Marvel wanted to make a short, action packed film - so about 70 mins of
footage was dropped from the final cut (I believe a lot of which was written by
Norton).

Norton
was understandably pissed. He was brought onto the project
under the premise
that he would have considerable creative control.
But the final cut was, of
course, not his. Norton and Leterrier

lobbied for a more nuanced
cut of the film that ran about two hours
and 15-20 minutes, but Marvel stuck
to their guns.

I
am not sure if this answers your question exactly - but I hope it throws some more light
on your query.