Actor Mark Ruffalo has a well-documented history of inadvertently dropping spoilers to Marvel movies, an offense that you might think could result in termination or at least a stern warning in the ultra-secretive Marvel Cinematic Universe. So when the new trailer and poster for Avengers: Endgame dropped yesterday, Mark Ruffalo was psyched to see that he was still in them and wasn’t fired. Take a look:
No, Mark, you weren’t fired, but the press tour for Avengers: Endgame hasn’t begun yet, so I suppose there’s still time. Given his many screw-ups and spoilery slips of the tongue, Mark Ruffalo can’t be too sure about his employment status, so he even queries it in his tweet. It’s a combination of curious befuddlement and elated shock to see himself in the new marketing.
Mark Ruffalo knows he should be fired, and yet there he is in the middle of the Avengers: Endgame poster. It’s definitely him too because his name is on it. And while he knows better than anyone that the actor who plays the Hulk can be replaced, he appears as Bruce Banner, not the Hulk. So there can be no doubt, Mark Ruffalo has not been fired and is still part of the MCU, a fact he is understandably psyched about.
The three-time Oscar nominee has been joking about being fired for a while now, leaning in to the perception that he spoils MCU movies after his various actual slip-ups. Back in October, Mark Ruffalo appeared on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon and jokingly said that he let a spoiler for Avengers 4 slip and the Russo Brothers have been playing along, telling him he’s fired ever since.
But like bullets on the Hulk’s thick green skin, those firings have just bounced off Mark Ruffalo and he remains very much in the movie.
However, Mark Ruffalo’s co-stars have even started teasing him about his loose-lipped ship sinking. Don Cheadle, who was sitting beside Mark Ruffalo for his most notorious “everybody dies” spoiler, has joked that he doesn’t want to do press with him anymore. On his latest appearance on The Tonight Show, the host even had Mark Ruffalo hooked up to a lie detector to try and grill him for answers.
We don’t know the answers for the Hulk or Avengers: Endgame yet, but we certainly have a lot of questions. Ruffalo’s Bruce Banner only appears once in the new trailer and we have yet to see the Hulk at all in the trailers for the Phase 3 capper. Obviously Bruce Banner and the green guy were going through some stuff in Avengers: Infinity War, but how that will be sorted out in Endgame is being kept under wraps.
Also of note, Mark Ruffalo may have escaped termination and is in the movie, but he does not appear with the rest of the team in the shot towards the end of the trailer where they are all suited up, presumably for some time travel/Quantum Realm adventures. Of course, we don’t see Captain Marvel or Thor in those shots either. Shots of them could have just been omitted for any number of reasons, or maybe those three, the three heaviest hitters, are off doing something else. But what?
Mark Ruffalo has less than 42 days to keep quiet and maintain his employment. Avengers: Endgame arrives in theaters on April 26. Check out our 2019 release schedule for that and all the other big movies you can look forward to this year.
