About three months ahead of its Disney+ debut, Marvel Studios delivered the first full look at Tatiana Maslany and Mark Ruffalo in the official trailer for She-Hulk. With this being the first Hulk-centric project in the MCU in over 14 years, She-Hulk comes as a major turning point for the MCU as a brand-new character takes her place in Phase 4.
Part of what makes this series such a game-changer for the MCU is that it's the first project, streaming or theatrical, to feature a leading character brought to life with as much CGI as Jennifer Walters. Even considering how much digital work Marvel Studios uses on most of its projects, which has increased in Phase 4, another giant green monster of a heroine is certainly a big endeavor for the ever-successful MCU.
While fans have already made their feelings known on some of that VFX work, Marvel is delivering a larger-than-life character who boasts nearly the same size as her counterpart in Ruffalo's Hulk yet with notably less muscle. A recent social media post suggests that the VFX team had another challenge to work through during the development process.
Marvel Requested for She-Hulk to be "Smaller"
VFX artist Sean Ruecroft took to Twitter to share some of the developments behind She-Hulk's look on-screen in the She-Hulk: Attorney at Law Disney+ series.
In response to a Tweet that seemed to criticize the muscular size of She-Hulk in the recent She-Hulk trailer (sharing the above image with the caption "When the character creator doesn't let you make buff women"), Ruecroft indicated that the 6-foot, 7-inch tall character had a more muscular build earlier in the process. That is, until the Marvel Studios creative team emphasized to the visual effects team to "make her smaller" multiple times in the process:
"I was at a company that did VFX for this. Apparently she was bigger early on, but the notes kept saying to 'make her smaller.' We always roll our eyes (like we did on Sonic) but at the end of the day artists gotta follow orders."
Ruecroft was also a VFX artist on 2018's Avengers: Infinity War and the recently-released Moon Knight.
How Muscular Was She-Hulk Originally?
Getting the sizing right on characters that are developed fully through CGI is always a difficult task, especially some of the bigger ones like Vin Diesel's Groot or Mark Ruffalo's Hulk. Even with a reference point for She-Hulk in a similar character like the Hulk, going so heavy-handed in the VFX department gave the team on this show a new set of issues to work with.
The biggest question that comes from these quotes: how much more muscular was She-Hulk before the footage that fans saw in the first trailer?
Kevin Feige described the character as being "well over 6'7" in his initial description from Disney+ Day 2020, whereas the Hulk is anywhere from seven to eight feet tall in his appearances. This likely changed and ultimately settled into something consistent when Bruce Banner figured out his Smark Hulk persona, letting Marvel Studios work off that as a baseline for where to put She-Hulk.
At the moment, it's still unclear why the studio and the VFX department had some discrepancies on the character's size, although fans may never find out the real reasons behind those issues. The only hope is that her height doesn't take away from the suspension of disbelief in the show as a whole, especially as the CGI continues to develop until the series arrives in full.
She-Hulk: Attorney at Law will debut on Disney+ on August 17.
