Scientist Bruce Banner and his alter ego The Hulk will next appear in Thor: Ragnarok, but everyone wants to know when the Green Goliath will headline his own solo film again. Universal Pictures still owns distribution rights and that means Marvel Studios would take all of the risk with production costs and share any potential profits with Universal. If a new deal can be struck between the two studios maybe would get a new Hulk standalone film, but according to Ruffalo's latest comments fans shouldn't hold their breath waiting for one.

"Actually, it feels even further away," Ruffalo told USA Today. "It's not Marvel's property, it's Universal's property. I don't know. It seems really problematic." Ruffalo isn't too concerned, though. "There's only so much that's in my power and I'm not going to agonize over what is not in my power."

A solo Hulk film would be great, but the character has been at his cinematic best, so far, when part of an ensemble. But if Ruffalo had it his way, he knows what he'd like to explore the duality of The Hulk/Banner relationship. "When you get off of the planet Earth, you can start playing with that stuff a little bit," he explained. "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."

The Hulk/Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo) will next appear in Thor: Ragnarok, which begins filming in Australia in June of 2016 and is scheduled to be released in theaters on November 3, 2017.