Hulk Director Louis Leterrier Talks Cameos.
With ‘The Hulk’ smashing his way onto screens this week, director Louis Leterrier has revealed some interesting cameo factoids.
In keeping with the current trend for crossing characters over films (we’ve seen Captain America’s shield in Iron Man, Tony Stark in Hulk) director Louis Leterrier has explained how he tried to include Spider-man in the film:
“The University at the end [where Banner meets with Samuel Sterns] is Columbia University. Columbia University in the Marvel world, especially in the ‘Spider Man’ world, is Empire State University,” the director explained. “I wanted some kind of shot where you’re like, ‘Oh my god. Is that Peter Parker?’ That would have been fun!”
Unfortunately for Leterrier, crossovers begin and end with the properties Marvel has total control of – no matter how hard you ask. And “Spider-Man” all its many names, places, and stories therein, belong to Sony. But while he quickly realized that he wouldn’t be able to get Tobey Maguire (no matter how much he wanted to), Leterrier thought a compromise could be reached. No dice, he sighed.
“I just wanted to call it Empire University – to treat it like a coherent world,” he recalled. “And Sony, who has the rights to Spidey, didn’t want us to do that. It was a small thing but something we couldn’t do.”
Still, Leterrier is such a fan of comics, and the new combined Marvel universe in particular, he’s already jealous of the director who one day, he knows, will get to do what he couldn’t.
“Marvel is pretty good at doing their own movies and so eventually the studios will allow them to chaperone the production of [all of them],” he said. “Years from now you’ll see Peter Parker meeting Bruce Banner.”
DISCUSS: What’s your view on the recent cameos trend in Superhero movies?