One interesting change to The Avengers lineup is the way in which director Joss Whedon has treated the character of Bruce Banner/The Hulk.  There was little or no physical resemblance between the most famous Banner/Hulk combination, Bill Bixby and Lou Ferrigno, who played the bifurcated character in the popular long-running Hulk television series.  Even in the modern Hulk movies Eric Bana and Edward Norton morphed into to giant CGI characters with few physically characteristics tying them to the actors playing Banner, but Whedon has kept his Hulk reasonably-sized with a heavy resemblance to actor Mark Ruffalo.

 

For The Avengers Whedon not only secured the services of a top flight actor to play Bruce Banner in Mark Ruffalo, he was determined to make his Hulk look and move like a greatly expanded version of Ruffalo’s Bruce Banner, though Whedon also made sure that his Hulk was never more than 8 and half-feet tall.  One of the most recent stills released by Marvel Studios indicates that Whedon has definitely succeeded in making his Hulk resemble Ruffalo. 

 

Whedon used motion-capture technology with Ruffalo to make sure that his Hulk and Bruce Banner moved in the same way, and he decided to make the characters resemble each other as much as possible as Whedon told Comic Book Movie: “Very early on we decided to build the Hulk's face off of Mark's, not just in terms of what he was going to do movement-wise in playing the character, but also the actual physicality of it, including the bone structure and contours of the eyes and mouth. We really wanted to bridge the gap between the characters so that when he turns into the Hulk, you go, 'Oh my God, that's Bruce Banner!  Only he is big and green and very angry!”