Select stars from Joss Whedon's upcoming The Avengers film Chris Evans (Captain America), Cobie Smulders (Maria Hill), Mark Ruffalo (the Hulk), Tom Hiddleston (Loki) and Clark Gregg (Agent Coulson) plus Marvel Studios President Kevin Feige hit NYCC this past weeknd to give fans yet another look at Marvel's multi-hero movie. The stars each shared insights into their Avenger roles and talked about their experiences on the set of the film, but the main highlight was clearly the exclusive sneak peek involving Ed Norton's Bruce Banner/Hulk replacement Mark Ruffalo. Hit the jump for a very spoiler-filled description of what went down during the footage.

According to numerous sources, the footage picks up with Bruce Banner acting as a doctor to sick patients in an unnamed Middle Eastern village. A young village girl gets his attention by asking him to come help her family, which turns out to be a ruse, as she leads him into an empty house occupied only by an uncostumed Black Widow who has been sent to collect him. The girl flees just as Banner realizes he's been tricked, leaving the two to talk.

Introducing herself by her civilian name Natasha Romanoff, Black Widow taunts Banner for choosing to work under highly stressful conditions and he counters by pointing out that if she's come to assassinate him, it's not going to work.

Wired has an extensive rundown of what happens next:

"I'm here on behalf of S.H.I.E.L.D."

"What if I say no."

"I'll persuade you."

"What if the other guy says no." (Crowd goes nuts.)

"You've been two years without an accident." They continue to argue a bit and Natasha reveals that Nick Fury needs Bruce's help with a Tesseract rock, which has enough energy to wipe out the planet. They can't find it and they need the best gamma ray scientist for the job. She continues to try to win him over stating, "No one is going to put you in a cage." But at that moment Bruce loses it. "Stop lying to me!" he yells as he slams his hands on on the table. (Crowd goes nuts again.)

Bruce looks up and Natasha has pulled her gun on him. She's terrified.

And then it's a stand-off. Bruce tries to calm himself saying that we can do this without getting "him" involved. Slowly Natasha brings the radio up and orders everyone to stand down. Cut to an aerial shot of the hut surrounded by massive team of S.H.I.E.L.D. agents, all pointing their guns at the shack.

Before the footage was screened, Ruffalo commented on having to live up to the work of actors like Bill Bixby and, of course, Ed Norton. While he joked that his role is "our generation's Hamlet... everyone's going to get a shot at the part," he said that he worked to pay homage to what other actors had done but for his role he had to "Ruffal-ize it."

The panel closed with Feige giving fans an idea of Marvel's immediate movie timetable, mentioning that Iron Man 3 is in production with director Shane Black and that it's the first step in a second phase of single character-focused films that will potentially lead to an Avengers 2. He also clarified that Marvel's upcoming slate of cosmic films like The Inhumans and Guardians of the Galaxy will work as ensemble films right away without building from standalone material if they happen.

You can watch the full panel (sans the movie footage) below:


[Via Wired/CBR]