If there are two incredibly bold choices made by the Russos in Avengers: Endgame, besides killing Thanos very early on, is making Bruce Banner Professor Hulk and also Thor fat. When Hulk and Rocket Raccoon pay the God of Thunder a visit, they had no idea what was awaiting them on the other side of the door: Thor, piss drunk with a huge beer belly. It’s a character choice that’s both funny and also adds a new dimension to a character that has hit his lowest of lows.
In an interview with ComicBook.com, Endgame VFX Supervisor Russell Earl and Industrial Light and Magic modelling supervisor Bruce Holcomb discuss their efforts in transforming the sexy washboard ab-ed Chris Hemsworth into an overweight videogamer. When asked if it was prosthetics or digital, the crew had this to say:
Earl: No, he ate cheeseburgers nonstop. [laughs] No, that was a great prosthetic. He was wearing a prosthetic that I believe Legacy did for his suit. There was a big scene down the back that we cleaned up, and then we just cleaned it up in places where it didn’t quite bend right at the elbows and shoulders.
Holcomb: Under the arms.
Earl: Under the arms, yeah. I think we ended up adding a little bit of hair here and there. I know, it was a great prosthetic, it just required some cleaning up. I think we added some jiggle in a couple of spots too.
Earl also discussed how they managed to find the right balance between brawny Hulk and brainy Bruce Banner in the Professor Hulk character.
“One of the things we did was we obviously went back and looked at the Hulk that we had done in the prior films. We were fortunate in that a lot of the people that were working on this movie had worked on the prior films, like the Ang Lee Hulk movie, the last Avengers movie, and Thor: Ragnarok, so we’ve had a pretty solid history of Hulk at ILM.
The fun part about this guy was it was taking down big muscley Smash Hulk and giving him a little bit more Ruffalo. We looked at all the previous models, and we did comparisons. We were looking at Ruffalo and the key art that we got from the guys at Marvel, and then it was really just taking all of those things and trying to dial in just the right amount of Hulk, keeping the big muscley dude, but then also getting enough of the smarts, or the brains, from Ruffalo in there.”
Avengers: Endgame is currently the second highest grossing film of all time, only a couple of hundred million short of Avatar‘s $US 2.7 billion total.
