Steven Spielberg once said: “If a person can tell me the idea in 25 words or less, it’s going to make a pretty good movie.” And Marvel’s most popular big-screen superheroes can be described using less than half that number. Iron Man is a tech bro in a tin suit; Spider-Man has the powers of an arachnid; Thor is a Norse god. Go and watch a film featuring any of these characters and you know exactly what you’re going to get.
But then there is Ghost Rider, who, according to reports from San Diego Comic-Con last week, will be the subject of a new Marvel Cinematic Universe film directed by Deadpool & Wolverine’s Shawn Levy, and starring Ryan Gosling. There is no quick way to explain what is going on with this guy. In the 1972 origin story, stunt motorcyclist Johnny Blaze sells his soul to Satan to save his adoptive father from cancer. The cure works but its beneficiary is killed almost immediately. The devil then tries to claim Johnny’s soul and, when that fails, binds him to the demon Zarathos. This, if Christopher Marlowe is to be believed, ought to result in corruption, despair and eternal, fiery damnation. Yet somehow our hero emerges from the arrangement with a cool flaming skull, vast supernatural powers and a motorbike capable of riding up buildings and across dimensions. Blaze regards the whole arrangement as a curse, but to the casual observer his principal penance is to roam the Earth passing judgment on people more wicked than he is, while looking good in a leather jacket.
