As usual, it took place in Hall H, with thousands of people crammed into a room in San Diego. The lights were just right, and Kevin Feige walked onstage with that energy that means something important is about to be said. There wasn’t polite applause when Ryan Gosling’s name came up next to Ghost Rider. The noise a room makes when it really can’t believe what it heard was that one.
Gosling will play Johnny Blaze in a Marvel Studios movie called “Ghost Rider,” which will be directed by Shawn Levy and come out in 2028. It’s Gosling’s first major comic book role, which, given how long fans have wanted this, feels both a little overdue and just right at the same time.
It doesn’t happen in some versions of this story. Ghost Rider rumors about Gosling went around for years, like rumors do: they kept going around, made sense, but were never confirmed. Gosling was careful with his words right up until March 2026, when he only said that “some discussions have been had” and that it was “a complicated situation.” When people use that careful language, it usually means that either the deal is very close or it’s slowly falling apart. This time, it was the first one.
Shawn Levy could be the person who made that happen. They worked together on Star Wars: Starfighter, which is set to come out in May 2027. Whatever happened on that set seems to have made them both want to work together again. As Ryan started talking about this character, Levy made it clear from the Hall H stage: “The chance, I was like, bro, let’s ride.” It sounds like a casual quote, but it was probably the result of months of serious talk. It seems like both men are really excited about this and not just following through on a deal.
As a character, Ghost Rider has had a rough time on screen. Nicolas Cage played Johnny Blaze in both Sony’s 2007 movie and its 2011 follow-up. While some people still strongly defend Cage’s performance as Johnny Blaze, both movies got bad reviews from critics. Then Gabriel Luna brought a different Ghost Rider to TV with Robbie Reyes in Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., which gained a devoted fan base before a planned Hulu spinoff was quietly shelved in 2019. The character has never quite found their feet on screen, which is one reason why this news feels like a real swing.
Even by Marvel standards, Johnny Blaze’s origin story is really weird. A motorcycle stuntman sells his soul to the demon Mephisto so that Mephisto can cure his father’s cancer, but his father dies in a stunt accident anyway. He is then bonded to the Spirit of Vengeance, a supernatural being with a skull covered in hellfire and the power to make someone feel all the pain they’ve ever caused others through a technique called the Penance Stare. It’s darker, stranger, and more spiritually charged than most of what the MCU has done before. It’s a good question whether Levy, who is best known for his funny roles in Deadpool & Wolverine and Free Guy, is the right voice for that tone. On the web, not everyone agrees. After the news came out, a tweet that was widely shared called the pairing of Gosling and Levy “the greatest two-sentence horror story ever written.” It got a lot of attention because people are worried, even if they’re not right.
Still, it’s important to note that some people thought Levy was an odd choice to direct Deadpool and Wolverine, too, and the movie did well. Gosling, on the other hand, just finished Project Hail Mary, in which he showed that he can play a serious and emotionally difficult role for two hours straight without getting tired. It’s not hard to imagine him doing something really interesting with a character who is basically a man trying to get out of a deal he made out of desperation.
Oscar Isaac, who plays Moon Knight in the MCU, has said in public that he wants Ryan Gosling to be in the universe as Ghost Rider and has brought up the idea of a Midnight Sons project. It’s not clear if that’s been talked about behind closed doors. But the actors they’ve chosen show that Marvel isn’t just filling a spot; they seem to have had a clear idea for a while.
As I watch this happen, I have a feeling that this Marvel announcement will land differently than most of them. Perhaps it’s because Gosling wanted this part for years instead of just taking it. It could be the idea that Ghost Rider, if done right, could be very different from anything else the MCU has made before. 2028 seems both too far away and too close.
