The new Marvel series, ‘She-Hulk: Lawyer Hulka’ is now available on Disney + and, although it seems that everything comes from the thinking mind of Kevin Feige and company, there were already adaptation attempts in the 90s of the emerald superheroine. One of them was going to be starring Brigitte Nielsen and never saw the light.
The nineties were, to put it mildly, a very turbulent time for Marvel. Although they began unbeatably with a splendid IPO in the summer of 1991, in the following months a perfect storm began to build that led to the publisher to bankruptcy in the middle of the decade.
Looking for Marvel’s “Disney”
And this not only from the comics department and the disbandment of stars. Stan Lee had been chasing the great opportunity to take their stories to the cinema and, despite the fact that there was already talk of James Cameron’s Spiderman, none of the projects seemed to come to fruition and the few that did had neither the quality nor the desirable reception.
But there was a ray of light: in the late eighties Ronald Perelmanwho also had his shares in Marvel, took control of New Worldthe production company founded by Roger Corman, with the ambitious plan of “create a mini-Disney in terms of intellectual property, based on the Marvel characters”. Sure, it didn’t go well.
At Cannes, the production company announced plans for a sequel of ‘Avenger’ (‘The Punisher’) and an adaptation of She-Hulk. Months later, Perelman sold much of the company’s operations to Sony and other companies, with some things falling by the wayside. However, he remained determined to get the new great adaptation of the publisher.
Hulka’s case, for example, was curious since there was not only one but at least three attempts to adapt the character during those years. And, like the creation of the character, the Hulk series from the ’70s had a lot to do with it.
the golden hulk
The first was in ‘The death of the Mass‘ (‘Death of the Incredible Hulk’), a film that closed the story of Dr. Banner (Bill Bixby) and in which the original plans gave a certain prominence to his female counterpart. Finally, Jennifer Walters’ appearance scrapped for unknown reasons.
However, the following year the pilot for a series was developed with part of the original fiction team and driven by Bill Bixby himself. Jill Sherman Donner wrote a pilot titled ‘Metamorphosis’ in which an assistant district attorney runs into Banner on vacation, who allegedly faked his own death. After being shot, the scientist will save his life.
Here we would have several differences with the comics: first, that they would not be familiar (and in fact there are flirtations here); second, that She-Hulk would not retain Jen’s intelligence, and third, we would not have an emerald colossus… but the monster’s skin would be golden. In Sherman’s words:
“I made it gold instead of green because green is not pretty. Changing her skin color made her look more feminine, beautiful and different than just green.»
For the role of She-Hulk (similar to with Lou Ferrigno in the original), hired volleyball player Gabrielle Reece. Part of the failure of the pilot was that ABC was never sold on the cast. Jennifer’s interpreter, Mitzki Capture (‘Baywatch’) did not seem like a sufficiently well-known actress for the project to go ahead and finally they canceled it.
Red Sonja She-Hulk
Bill Bixby’s death seemed to doom every attempt to bring She-Hulk to the screen once and for all, but New World tried again, this time as a film in 1994. Again it did not come to fruition and of said tape there are only a couple of images to attract investors, since there is no evidence that a single frame was shot.
The little that is known about this film was that it was going to star Brigitte Nielsen, the iconic Red Sonja of the eighties. In the address would be the director of series B Larry Cohen on a libretto by Carl Gottlieb (‘Shark’). Although there has been some speculation, the plot of this lost adaptation never came to light.
This became yet another flop in Marvel’s troubling record, whose last bullets of external productions consisted in ‘Fantastic Four’ and ‘Generation X’. Perelman declared bankruptcy in 1996 and Marvel was on the verge of disappearing forever.
However, one of Perelman’s last moves as a businessman was a small mattress from which to be reborn: part of the money that New World generated as part of Fox News fell into the hands of Avi Arad, who had founded Marvel Studios and was intended to start an era of co-productions that a couple of years later he would inaugurate with ‘Blade’. But that is another story.