WorldOfSuperheroes.com has posted a few excerpts from SFX magazine's recent interview with Kevin Feige, President of Production for Marvel Studios. In the interview, Feige confirms that the Hulk will be in the 2012 Avengers film, saying (I have to assume the WorldOfSuperheroes guys left out some punctuation, but this is their transcription), "The Avengers comes in 2012 its not just a team super hero movie with a bunch of characters with powers, its three people, four including Hulk, five including Nick Fury -- who you have seen before in other movies, coming together for the very first time." So, the Hulk will be there.

What's more surprising, though, is what Feige said about the inclusion of the fantastical, Norse-mythological character Thor:

... I don't think [incorporating Thor into the film] will be difficult because that's what Thor is. We're doing the Stan Lee / Jack Kirby / Walt Simonson / J. Michael Straczynski Thor. We're not doing the blow the dust of the old Norse book in your library Thor and in the Thor of the Marvel universe there's a race called The Asgardians, and we're linked through this tree of life that we're unaware of. It's real science, but we don't know about it yet. The Thor movie is about teaching people that.

Yep, Thor's existence and superpowers are going to be explained scientifically. This could work, I guess, but it sounds like something that would be incredibly difficult to pull off. Director Alex Proyas, for example, has done similar things, most notably in Knowing, and there are two things worth noting about that movie. First off, even though I thought Proyas's endeavor worked pretty well, the vast majority of critics disagreed (though I do have Roger Ebert and fellow Sci-Fi Block writer John Dubrawa on my side). Second, explaining the real science of what at first seems to be magical or spiritual would seem to require much more time and care than what an Avengers movie is going to be capable of providing. This is a flick with multiple main-character superheroes, and though most of their origins will already have been explained in other films, there will still need to be a significant amount of time spent on their stories as they relate to the events of the film at hand. To have Thor show up and sit us down to explain where he came from would seem to necessitate either grinding the movie to a temporary halt or shifting the focus heavily to Thor and his story, which would effectively make this a Thor origins film.

I'm not saying it can't be pulled off, but the writing/directing team is going to have quite a balancing act on their hands.