Ryan Gosling Walks Into Ghost Rider's Two-Actor Trap

Ryan Gosling is joining Marvel's Cinematic Universe as Ghost Rider, walking into a structural trap that two A-list actors have already hit and failed to escape.

Nicolas Cage played Ghost Rider twice. The first film came out in 2007 as a straightforward action vehicle—Cage did exactly what Cage does, mugging and winking at the audience while motorcycles exploded—but it underperformed relative to its budget and franchise ambitions.

Five years later, Marvel Studios tried again with Ghost Rider, Spirit of Vengeance, this time giving control to the directing team behind Crank and letting Cage lean harder into absurdist visual excess. It lost money more definitively than the first, and by the third year, Marvel moved on. The structural problem wasn't Cage's performance.

It was the character's fundamental mismatch between visual identity and tonal stability. Ghost Rider demands a flaming skull and a supernatural motorcycle—visuals that read as inherently ridiculous the moment you name them. Everything around him has to justify why we're watching something that looks like a heavy metal album cover. Cage, understanding this instability, leaned into camp. Marvel watched audiences reject that choice and concluded that the fix was casting gravitas instead.

This assumes the problem was the actor's interpretation rather than the character's design. Some characters are structurally unfilmable not because they're waiting for better casting but because their visual and narrative DNA create a permanent conflict between what they look like and how audiences accept stories. You can't solve that with star power or a more serious performance. You can only hope audiences have changed since 2011. Watch whether Gosling tries to play the character straight—if he does, Marvel hasn't learned from Cage's films, and if he doesn't, he'll prove the studio learned nothing by hiring him in the first place.