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There is an old tradition in the Marvel films that the outgoing hero passes the mantle to the new one, usually with a shield, occasionally with a hammer, and once memorably with a pair of fancy sunglasses. Ghost Rider’s version has now happened in the pages of The Hollywood Reporter, where Nicolas Cage, the original flaming skull, gave his verdict on Ryan Gosling taking over the role. “Ryan’s going to do his thing with it and I’m looking forward to seeing it,” he said. No jealousy, no anguish, not a single eyeball rolled back into his head. It’s practically the most restrained Nicolas Cage performance on record.
Gosling’s casting was revealed back in July in Hall H at San Diego Comic-Con, where Marvel Studios announced Ghost Rider for 28 July 2028, directed by Shawn Levy. “As you know, this is a character I’ve wanted to play for a very long time,” Gosling told the crowd, and Levy summed up the film’s creative philosophy in three words: “Bro, let’s ride.” Jonathan Tropper is reported to be writing. Marvel has not actually said which Ghost Rider Gosling is playing. Johnny Blaze is the obvious bet, but the comics have had several men with burning skulls, and there’s no point guessing until someone in a suit confirms it.
It will be a busy couple of years for the pair. Levy and Gosling are also making Star Wars: Starfighter, due in May 2027, which means that the man who played Ken is going from a lightsaber to a chain of hellfire in fourteen months. It’s quite a career arc for a doll, and it does rather suggest that nobody in Hollywood has ever told Shawn Levy “no”.
Cage’s blessing does carry some weight. He’s a lifelong comics fan who famously borrowed his stage surname from Luke Cage, and he played Johnny Blaze twice. Mark Steven Johnson’s Ghost Rider came out in February 2007, cost somewhere between $110 and $120 million, and took around $229 million worldwide, despite a 28% score on Rotten Tomatoes. Five years later Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor made Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance, which managed to get even worse reviews while still turning a profit. That’s the Ghost Rider brand in a nutshell: critically damned and commercially indestructible, which is also the plot of most Ghost Rider comics.
Time has been kind to those films, or at least kind to Cage in them. Twenty years on, his Ghost Rider looks less like a misfire and more like a man who was playing a demonic stunt rider at full volume while everyone else on set was playing a Marvel movie at medium. The internet has turned his performance into a museum of reaction GIFs, and there are worse legacies for a superhero film. Cage has already had a second go at a comic-book role in recent years, so he has every reason to be generous about someone else having a go at his.
Gosling, meanwhile, has form as a lone man on a motorcycle in The Place Beyond the Pines and a lone man in a car in Drive, which is to say he has spent fifteen years rehearsing for a part in which most of his face is on fire. Whether Marvel lets the film be properly unhinged, or sands it down into another sensible Phase Seven multiverse instalment, is the real question. The best thing Cage left behind was the proof that Ghost Rider only works if somebody is willing to go absolutely all in. On that front, at least, the skull has passed into safe hands.
Sources: Marvel.com, Screen Rant (reporting The Hollywood Reporter).
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