At this year’s recently concluded Comic-Con, Marvel Studios returned to Hall H for the first time in several years. While the vast majority of the time and resources throughout their presentation were spent drumming up further excitement for the release of Avengers: Doomsday, later this year, there were also a few more surprising announcements that made their way in, including the reveal of a new horror-leaning film starring an A-list actor that isn’t Mahershala Ali’s Blade. Rather, at this year’s presentation, Marvel announced that they are working on a new Ghost Rider movie, starring Ryan Gosling.
This is fascinating in a number of ways, chiefly because Ryan Gosling has been openly campaigning for this role for several years now. While Gosling has been a fixture of pop culture for decades, his star has risen significantly with general audiences over the course of the past several years, thanks to the mammoth-sized success of films like Barbie and Project Hail Mary. The actor is clearly a fan of the character and appeared on-stage alongside the announcement at Comic-Con and appeared full of ambition and excitement to finally be tackling this passion project.
Interestingly, this is far from the first live-action adaptation of the Ghost Rider character. Previously, the character received two live-action feature films starring Nicolas Cage, in the form of 2007’s simply titled Ghost Rider and 2009’s Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance. While neither film exactly lit the world on fire or received excessive amounts of acclaim, they were each modest successes, and the first one even featured Gosling’s wife, Eva Mendes, in a co-starring role, so that’s fun.
Cage was heavily considered to be a featured cameo as Ghost Rider in the recent Deadpool & Wolverine; however, scheduling prevented that from becoming a reality. Cage has since moved on to other superheroics within the Marvel multiverse, with his role as Spider-Noir in the Spider-Verse films and his own spinoff series, and even prior to the Gosling announcement, the character of Ghost Rider had also moved on.
Ghost Rider has actually already been rebooted for the modern MCU previously, with the character debuting in the fourth season of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. in 2016. There, the character was played by Gabriel Luna but was actually a different variation on the character. Luna played Robbie Reyes, a much more recent character to take up the mantle in the comics, whereas Cage played the original iteration of the character, the aptly named Johnny Blaze.
It remains to be seen what version of the character Gosling will play. Considering that there have been a multitude of different characters to take on the Ghost Rider powers over the years, it is entirely possible that Gosling could be playing a different character entirely, allowing the film to preserve the canonicity of prior versions, should they want to. If I were a betting man, I would put money on Gosling simply being Blaze, especially considering that the film will be releasing in a post-Secret Wars world, where Marvel is allegedly trying to simplify the overwrought continuity to be more accessible to general audiences once again.
Set to be directed by Shawn Levy, the Ryan Gosling-starring MCU Ghost Rider film is currently set for release in 2028.
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