8 Comic Book Characters Hollywood Will Never Understand
4. Ghost Rider
Marvel Comics
The fact that Ghost Rider is yet to receive a proper adaptation on the big screen is genuinely baffling - especially since the character boasts one of the coolest designs in the medium, as well as one of Marvel's most compelling origins.
Since 2007, audiences have seen two Ghost Rider films on the big screen - both of which starred Nicolas Cage. While Cage himself is reportedly a massive fan of the superhero, he was always a strange pick for Johnny Blaze, and even Dan Ketch for that matter, who was the inspiration for Blaze's character in both Rider movies.
Right from the very get-go there were issues. Blaze was the first mainstream Rider in the comics, but the character's definitive years came during Ketch's tenure with the Spirit of Vengeance. This poor footing then sent both Rider movies into a meandering mess of comic book movie cliches and cookie cutter plots, with 2012's Spirit of Vengeance - directed by those guys from Crank, and released under the Marvel Knights banner - proving to be the final nail in the character's coffin on the big screen.
The Rider really shouldn't be that difficult to get right, particularly now that Disney have the rights to the use the character in the MCU. And yet his absence intimates that no one really knows how to make Ghost Rider work, despite how brilliant the outlandish premise is.
WhatCulture's very own resident movie guy, Ewan has been working in the content creation biz for over 10 years now, having started as a freelance contributor to WhatCulture Gaming all the way back in 2015. After graduating with a First-Class Honours in History from Northumbria University in 2017 (where he won a prize for a totally killer dissertation on the Watergate years), Ewan took on the role of Comics Editor at WhatCulture and quickly developed WhatCulture Comics into one of the biggest superhero-focused channels on YouTube. He followed this with a brief hiatus at Screen Rant in 2021, where he worked across the Gaming and Film sections as a writer and editor, before returning to WhatCulture as a Senior Content Producer / Presenter in 2023. He started his own podcast, We Love Dad Movies, in 2022, and has contributed several written pieces to the Eisner-nominated comics website Shelfdust as well.
In his current role, Ewan incorporates his love of cinema, comic books, and history into written pieces and video essays for WhatCulture's Film & TV channel, as well as WhatCulture Gaming and WhatCulture Horror, with a particular focus on nineties-era Dad Movies, old school Westerns, and Golden Age Hollywood Noir. John Carpenter is his fave, and he thinks Batman Beyond should never have been cancelled. If that's your vibe, you'll probably like his stuff.
