After the events of The Incredible Hulk, it seemed like Marvel's gentle green giant and characters related to him would be relegated to periphery status in the future of the MCU. However, that is not the case with She-Hulk now set to debut on Disney+ this summer. This half-hour legal comedy will follow Bruce Banner's cousin Jennifer Walters as she navigates life as a super-powered attorney at law.
Walters, who will be played by Tatiana Maslany, will be joined by Mark Ruffalo's Bruce Banner as well as a few other returning faces from throughout the MCU. A couple of these familiar characters include Tim Roth's Emil Blonsky as well as Benedict Wong's Wong (who comes hot off his appearance in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness).
This will not be the first time Wong and Abomination have appeared in a Marvel project together, as the pair were last seen squaring off in Shang-Chi in the Legend of the Ten Rings. And while it may not have seemed like much when it happened, this Shang-Chi cameo may have actually been building up to something more.
A Familiar Cage for Abomination
As pointed out by The Direct reader Hubert Stępień, the first full She-Hulk: Attorney at Law trailer included a callback to last year's Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings.
Tim Roth's Emil Blonsky (aka Abomination) can be seen in the brief teaser housed within a cell that looks just like the one he and Wong teleport to in Shang-Chi.
This prison sports bright red support beams with large panes of glass to house the villain from The Incredible Hulk.
After the events at the Macau fight club in Shang-Chi, Wong opens a portal for the two, revealing a cell that seems to be the same one from the She-Hulk trailer.
From Shang-Chi to She-Hulk
Thus far in the Disney+ era of the MCU, there have only been a handful of connections from the Disney+ streaming side of the franchise to the big-screen mega-blockbusters. Of course, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness changed all that with a plot that was directly related to the events of last year's WandaVision.
While this doesn't look to be any more than a simple move to help with continuity, it is cool to see that Marvel Studios was laying the seeds all over for their future projects. Who could have known when Shang-Chi debuted back in September 2021 that it would directly connect with She-Hulk nearly a year later?
But that is what makes what Marvel Studios has crafted in the MCU so special. At any moment, something could come back from the franchise's great portfolio and service the story being told in the moment, or perhaps hint at something for the future. It's something that not many names in Hollywood can do, but Marvel is one of them.
She-Hulk: Attorney at Law debuts on Disney+ on August 17.
