By all rights, She-Hulk: Attorney at Law should be one of the most-hyped shows coming to Disney Plus. She-Hulk is an enormously popular Marvel Comics star, the supporting cast is great, and Mark Ruffalo is always welcome as Bruce Banner/Hulk. And yet the show is arriving under something of a cloud.
Much of that’s down to its main character. While in human form, Jennifer Walters is played by Tatiana Maslany, though when Hulked-out she’s replaced with a fully-CGI creation that was met with widespread derision when the trailer was released earlier this year. Now, perhaps in an effort to show that things are improving, Empire Magazine has released a new image from the ‘red carpet’ scene glimpsed in the trailer. Check it out:
We’re still on the fence: even in this still, the character doesn’t fit neatly into the scene. The lighting on her looks different from the men in the background, and there’s still a sense of smooth-skinned ‘Shrek-ness’ that many quickly identified during our first look at her.
Even so, let’s be optimistic. Maybe when the show begins, we’ll quickly get used to the way She-Hulk looks and be able to overlook the VFX deficiencies. The flip side is that if this remains looking off, it’ll be an almost impossible hurdle for the show to get over.
A photorealistic CGI human as the lead in a TV show is a hugely ambitious task for any VFX studio. Let’s hope Disney and Marvel Studios are giving them the time, budget, and talent to make this work. And, at this point, if they needed to push back the release date to be absolutely sure this looks right, few would argue.
She-Hulk: Attorney at Law premieres on Disney Plus on Aug. 17.