At Comic-Con last weekend, Marvel Studios revealed that they are now officially working on a new Ghost Rider film, set within the larger Marvel Cinematic Universe. The headline news about the announcement was that it is set to star Ryan Gosling, the uber-popular actor who has proven a reliable source of box office gold in recent years and has been speaking openly about his desire to play this character in a film for a long time. However, perhaps the more interesting news that has been flying a bit under the radar is that Marvel also announced the director who will be shepherding the film, and it is none other than Shawn Levy.
First things first, why did Marvel even announce the director at Comic-Con? Well, undoubtedly a part of it relates to the public perception of past transgressions. Infamously, Marvel announced a Mahershala Ali-starring Blade movie at Comic-Con back in 2019, and that film has still yet to materialize.
That film went through dozens of different writers and directors in the years following that initial announcement, so having a fully committed creative on-board for Ghost Rider from the jump is likely intended as a form of reassurance. After all, Blade and Ghost Rider are characters who are cut from the same cloth, and Marvel has clearly struggled to find a way to make these kinds of characters work for them within the confines of the MCU in the past.
But why Shawn Levy specifically? Well, that answer is two-fold. For one, Levy is already an established collaborator with Marvel, having directed the mega-hit of Deadpool & Wolverine. But secondly, he just wrapped up production on a different large-scale Disney production that also happened to star Ryan Gosling, Star Wars: Starfighter. That film is set for release in 2027, while Ghost Rider is now set for release in 2028, which means Gosling and Levy will be making films back-to-back with one another.
So between a litany of various connections, Levy is certainly a logical choice to act as the corporate-approved connection between Disney, Marvel, and Gosling’s high-wattage star power. But is he the right choice for a Ghost Rider movie, a film full of gothic aesthetics and horror genre leanings? The closest Levy has ever come to the horror genre was in Stranger Things, where he directed several episodes of every season. However, even in the making of that show’s most successful seasons, Levy was pretty open about not understanding horror as a genre, with showrunners the Duffer Brothers having to give him a watchlist of several essential horror films so that he could better understand the cinematic vernacular of what the show was going for. As the director himself said back in 2022, “Horror is really challenging to me because it doesn’t come as naturally to me.”
All of that to say, while I’m sure Levy seems like a safe choice for all of the producing parties involved in Ghost Rider, he also seems like an excessively safe choice from a creative perspective. Levy is likely to deliver a serviceable film, but he’s unlikely to lean into any of the more eccentric genre flourishes inherent to the character, because he’s not someone who thrives within that arena, by his own admission. Again, I’m sure this makes Ghost Rider feel like a much surer bet to Marvel Studios, especially after agonizing over the genre and tone of Blade for so long, but it also sends a pretty clear message to audiences: don’t expect anything too horror-indebted in this upcoming Ghost Rider film.
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