With Thor: Ragnarok not set to begin production until next summer, it’s surprising that we’ve been getting such a steady dose of news about the movie. Just this month, we’ve heard that Taika Waititi was in contention to direct (something we’ll touch on later), the possibility of a new female character, and of course, the news that Hulk will appear in the film.

Mark Ruffalo (Bruce Banner) has since confirmed his involvement and said how excited he is for the movie. Even more recently, he described Thor: Ragnarok as a ‘buddy’ movie but that’s not it.

While promoting his new movie Spotlight, Ruffalo caught up with USA Today about the third Thor movie. When asked about his role, Ruffalo confirmed the involvement of both Taika Waititi and Tom Hiddleston (Loki).

I don’t know what the story is yet, but it’ll be (Loki) and Thor, and then I’ll be in there here and there. But I don’t know any of the particulars quite yet. I’ve talked to Taika a little bit and I like where it’s headed. … Chris (Hemsworth) and I have a really good time together, we goof off and play around when Tom Hiddleston is around. So it’ll be a lot of funny back-and-forth, especially with Taika, he does that really well. It’ll have that kind of antagonistic Odd Couple-thing going on.

Neither of the confirmations are surprising at this point, but it is nice after all of Hiddleston’s comments about being unsure if he’ll be in it to be put to an end. When Ruffalo is on screen, he’s hoping to see the duel between Banner and Hulk for control.

When you get off of the planet Earth, you can start playing with that stuff a little bit. I’m angling for it. I don’t know if it’ll happen now, but at some point, I’d like to see it happen. When I was doing Age of Ultron — doing the Scarlet Witch acid trip scenes — it really took me a long time to figure out what the Hulk would be afraid of. And then I realized, it was Banner. That relationship is what we’re all so into, but we’ve never seen them in the same scene together — you’re either one or the other, or somewhere in between. But I always imagined that that could be pretty exciting if we could pull it off. In the Marvel Universe, there is some precedence for it. I remember as a kid, seeing a few of the comics that’d have this multidimensional thing, so there’s a lot of ways to do it … if we could find the right context to use it.

If this isn’t used in Thor: Ragnarok, it’s always possible it could show up in an eventual solo Hulk movie. Unfortunately for movie goers, Ruffalo doesn’t seem to think that will happen anytime soon.

Actually, it feels even further away. It’s not Marvel’s property, it’s Universal’s property. I don’t know. It seems really problematic.

After making a deal with Sony for Spider-Man, a lot of us, myself included, were curious if Marvel could finally get complete control of the Hulk back from Universal as well. Even though they don’t have the rights for a solo movie right now, we know that Kevin Feige has plenty of contingency plans in place in case this ever came to fruition.

Thor: Ragnarok is scheduled to hit theaters on November 17, 2017.

Source: USA Today