#NICOLAS CAGE GHOST RIDER MARVEL MOVIE#
#NICOLAS CAGE GHOST RIDER MARVEL PLUS#

There's something about it that looks almost like a hologram and trying to get that across at 24 frames per second, it was very tough.' Even when you look at real fire in a fireplace or a flickering campfire, it doesn't look real.

When we were doing it, it was very difficult and you realize how tricky fire is. 'The fire ended up taking over everything,' Johnson reveals. Despite the fact that 15 years have passed since Ghost Rider's theatrical bow, the CGI for its eponymous hero continues to hold up, more or less. Like, ‘Wait, so it's a flaming skull and a Harley Davidson?’ I’m like, ‘Yes, that's correct.’ So that was always tough to explain to people, but the graphic is so strong, the visual is always so powerful for Ghost Rider.' 'There was no Ghost Rider comic out at that time and so, when you have to explain these characters, it always takes a moment. 'I’m a big Harley Davidson fan myself, I’ve been a big motorcycle rider my whole life, and I always thought was the coolest, most underused character,' Johnson says.

#NICOLAS CAGE GHOST RIDER MARVEL MOVIE#

The idea of a skeletal motorcyclist punishing the wicked on behalf of Satan doesn't seem too far-fetched in the current comic book movie landscape, but back in 2007 (a year before Robert Downey Jr.'s indelible performance as Tony Stark changed everything), it was a major gamble for Sony/Columbia, which distributed Ghost Rider. It’s really incredible to see what he's done. 'He was always incredibly smart, very kind, very supportive,' Johnson remembers of Feige. Feige also produced 2003's Daredevil, another movie that Johnson wrote and directed that starred Ben Affleck as Matt Murdock and a pre- Iron Man Jon Favreau as Foggy Nelson.

#NICOLAS CAGE GHOST RIDER MARVEL PLUS#

But on the plus side, because there wasn't so much pressure of everything fitting into some grand design, you could do some things that were different, which I kind of pushed to the limit with Ghost Rider.'īy the late 2000s, future MCU architect Kevin Feige was already on the up-and-up as a leading executive of Marvel Studios, having served as a producer on the X-Men, Spider-Man, and Fantastic Four franchises. It was a very different kind of environment, you really had to fight a lot for your characters. 'We were more scrappy and trying to find a home for characters that I loved as a kid growing up, reading. It was a very different thing,' he tells us over Zoom. With 2007's Ghost Riderstreaming on Peacock this month, SYFY WIRE reached out to the film's writer-director, Mark Steven Johnson, for his recollections of the pre-MCU era. Long before Iron Man kicked off a shared cinematic universe the likes of which Hollywood had never seen, movies based on classic Marvel properties were quite disconnected from one another.

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