If Marvel Entertainment had only made one movie for release in 2008, they’d seem like the smartest film company going.

Forget Indiana Jones and the Graying Temples of Doom or whatever the new Raiders movie called itself - that’s a sunset picture, the last, glorious marketing gasp of a franchise of historic significance, with the accent on history. For all George Lucas’ drearily predictable pronouncements that he may make another Raiders flick with Shia LaBeouf in the lead, people are going to the current Indy adventure mostly to mark the passage of time for a collective memory of moviegoing from decades past, which is another way of saying that they’re hitting the theatres in part to say “Goodbye.”

No, Iron Man is where the action is this summer, because it’s the birth of a mega-franchise, and it’s grossed around twice the most optimistic pre-release predictions of how well it would do. And Marvel, a clever company tired of splitting grosses with movie studios and of having to accept interference from studio types on how its characters get presented, was smart enough to self-finance the flick, and to claim the vast majority of its upside (and the upside of its sequels) as a result. That makes Marvel visionaries by Hollywood’s standards of measurement, a company that gambled and made it pay off.

Trouble is, Marvel has another picture coming this summer, and this one’s troubled post-production history and the fact that it’s a sequel (even if it doesn’t want to admit it) to a disliked semi-success bode something a lot dicier.

Problem A for Franchise B is the character. For comic book fans, The Incredible Hulk is a far more loved creation than Iron Man ever was, and he’s a big, green, mutated TV icon too thanks to the (very) old Bill Bixby/Lou Ferrigno series. But despite his popularity, the Hulk’s general audience appeal is pretty limited. He’s liked by teenage boys mostly, because in his mono-syllabic rage and sheer brute power, he caters to every fantasy of adolescent omnipotence any pimpled kid has ever had. Even if he’s outlasted the heyday of Heavy Metal music, the Hulk’s monochromatic appeal is pretty similar - he’d like a power chord that plays endlessly at top volume. By contrast, Iron Man is a fluid and flexible figure with free will and a personality who can exult in his victories, rage against his failures and occupy the full range of human emotions in between, albeit in cartoon form. The Hulk has basically one affect: he’s angry - “A very pissed off Shrek” a reviewer called him when Ang Lee’s Hulk came out in 2003, in one of those rare lines I can quote from memory because I was so amused, and so envious of the guy for thinking it up.

And what about that Ang Lee movie - the one Marvel is claiming isn’t the first film in a Hulk franchise that this one follows up on but rather the cinematic equivalent of an “earth two” Hulk one-shot from a parallel world? Well, you can’t blame them for trying to parse things that way, since Lee’s movie was such a self-serious soap opera (like the last two Indiana Jones movies it was all about the Hulk’s daddy issues, remember?). A puzzling work by a usually great director, Hulk tried to “elevate” a piece of junk culture by larding it with overloaded Freudian subtexts, leaving fans and critics alike scratching their heads. And while the film was no bomb (it grossed an okay $246 million worldwide), Lee’s Hulk was expensive enough and enough of a fiscal disappointment that Universal, a studio with no comics franchise to call its own, still passed on a sequel, which is why Marvel has the movie rights back in its own hands.

Still, if this isn’t a sequel to Hulk, how come it reportedly starts with Hulk alter-ego Bruce Banner as a fugitive in South America, right where Ang Lee left him? Seems like a striking coincidence - and also like we’re supposed to remember the Hulk’s origin myth from the last movie, since we’re starting off here in medias res. And, despite all the recasting (Ed Norton replacing Eric Bana; Liv Tyler replacing Jennifer Connelly, etc.), does Marvel really expect the slightly sour taste of the Ang Lee Hulk to be completely absent from fandom’s palette when it assembles to watch the new picture? If so, the company is kidding itself - if I may extend a feeble metaphor until it collapses under its own weight, it just hasn’t been long enough between meals.

As if all that wasn’t enough, there’s the fractious post-production feud between Marvel and Incredible Hulk star Edward Norton, who appears to have gone all American History X on his Hulk production team. In case you don’t remember, American History X was the movie Norton and director Tony Kaye made together - a cult success that might have been an actual art-house hit if it wasn’t for the fact that Norton managed to get the studio to take the movie away from its director so he could recut it, causing Kaye to mount a PRINT ADVERTISING campaign against his own movie when it finally came out.

Marvel allegedly invited Norton to rewrite Zak Penn’s Incredible Hulk screenplay (he takes his co-writing credit under the pseudonym Edward Harrison), and then fell out with him over the picture’s editing (maybe nobody told Norton that, as a rule, writers don’t get to cut the movies they script?) Marvel prevailed (as studios do) but though Norton and Marvel claim to have made up, Norton still doesn’t appear to be doing any interviews for the picture. It’s an ominous portent for a $150 million movie that was never going to have the surprise factor that Iron Man was able to generate. The aroma of fiscal danger is also accentuated by the little-remarked fact that when Marvel announced its slate of pictures up to 2011 in the aftermath of Iron Man’s success, there was an Iron Man sequel alongside adaptations of Thor, The Avengers and Captain America - but no sequel to The Incredible Hulk.

Conventional wisdom has it that the Ang Lee Hulk disappointed because its director took the material way too seriously, and there’s some truth in that thought. It may also be, though, that the Hulk, with all his rage and pain and Jekyll/Hyde-isms is just a fairly joyless construct for the high popcorn season (the old TV series took itself pretty seriously too, as befitting a premise that was acknowledgedly based on the downbeat David Janssen tele-drama The Fugitive as much as Marvel’s comic book character). But what do I know? For the heck of it, here’s a number-crunching piece that claims The Hulk is tracking great, and that a reborn franchise is on the way:

Watch this space for details…