When he is not busting out of his shirt as the MCU's Bruce Banner/The Hulk, Mark Ruffalo has carved a name for himself as one of cinema's top actors, having gained himself three Oscar nods in recent years. It was announced today that he will be appearing alongside Emma Stone in Searchlight Pictures' Poor Things, a movie that takes the Frankenstein story and reimagines it in a whole new way.

It is the first new role to be announce for Ruffalo since he took home a Golden Globe award for his double role in I Know This Much To Be True, and a sure sign that demand for the 53 year old American actor is not about to slow anytime soon.

Poor Things, which is director Yorgos Lanthimos' first movie since The Favourite, which earned numerous award nominations including nods at the British Independent Film Awards, the Oscars and the Golden Globes, also stars Emma Stone and is based on a book by Scottish author Alasdair Gray. The novel itself has been described as "a thought-provoking duel between the desires of men and the independence of women" as well as being a send-up of the Victorian literature its main theme is taken from.

Poor things is not the only upcoming release we can expect to see Mark Ruffalo appearing in over the next year, as he also reprises role of Bruce Banner in Marvel's Disney+ series She-Hulk and voices his own green giant, The Hulk in Marvel animated series, What if? Outside his MCU connections, he has also just completed filming on The Adam Project, a time-travel based movie with Ryan Reynolds due to premiere on Netflix later this year.

Emma Stone is no stranger to being in demand herself, having just appeared at the first Red Carpet event of the year, and indeed the last year, in the run up to the release of Disney's Cruella, in which she plays a young version of the infamous dog-napping villain. As well as starring in Poor Things, she also produces the movie with Ed Guiney and Andrew Lowe.

Poor Things is being adapted by Tony McNamara who previously worked with director Lanthimos when he co-wrote the script for The Favourite.

The story of Poor Things centres on Stones character, Victoria, who takes drastic action to escape an abusive husband and drowns herself. However, that would not make much of a story on its own. Enter a surgeon, who revives the very much deceased Victoria by using the brain of the fetus she was pregnant with when she drowned, inserting it into her head and bringing her back to life as the infantile thinking Bella Baxter - a Frankenstein's monster unlike any that have gone before her.

It takes time for Bella's baby brain to start developing a social conscience, but during that time she manages to get engaged to a Glaswegian physician, and run away with a less than honest lawyer on an adventure across Europe. And all this before she is found by her former husband and things really begin to get interesting. The production is expected to start on the movie later in the year for a likely release sometime next year. This news originated at Collider.