Norton had experience as both a director and a playwright; he claimed that when his then-girlfriend Salma Hayek starred in Frida (2002), he had done an uncredited top-to-bottom rewrite of the screenplay. So before he agreed to star in The Incredible Hulk, he extracted a promise from Marvel that he would be able to revise Zak Penn’s screenplay. Norton believed the Hulk could carry some serious dramatic weight and had ambitions for the character to be more than brand-name intellectual property in another popcorn movie. Marvel considered Norton’s desire to get involved creatively to be a boon,
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