Director Brian Taylor said that an R-rated Ghost Rider film had chances of being made and it would have been quite amazing. Sadly, Taylor moved on to make Ghost Rider Spirit of Vengeance, which can be categorized among the worst comic book inspired film sequels ever. However, the film’s journey had started over a decade before the time when Deadpool set up the trend of R-rated films being a highly lucrative scenario for the studios. An insane amount of revisions eventually ruined what might have been a great film.
All this and more was disclosed by Brian Taylor in an interview sometime back. As told by him, Ghost Rider deserves to be adapted in R-rating, and the original Spirit of Vengeance script, which David S. Goyer (Batman Begins, Blade) had written was the ideal version of the character which the fans should see. This is what he said on the subject.
“I think that Ghost Rider should be a rated-R, horror character. The original script that David Goyer wrote for that movie, which was actually written almost a decade before the first Ghost Rider film, was a hardcore, rated-R horror script and it was awesome. Then, in the time between that and the second movie, the script had been rewritten literally 14 times or 16 times or something like that to the point where it was kind of a mess. It was also just a little too clean and a little too restrained. If we had had the opportunity to do the original, rated-R Goyer script, I think that movie would’ve been a classic.”
David S. Goyer has handled a large number of comic book films, with varying degree of success. However, he is highly talented. Probably, an R-rated Ghost Rider would have been fantastic. Ghost Rider’s fans saw a compelling version in Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. which generated the hunger for more of him in Marvel Cinematic Universe. During his mention of things that according to him were good with the film, Brian Taylor went to the extent of saying that the R-rated version of the film would have been far better than even the ‘vanilla’ version which was a part of the ABC series.
“I think the cast was really good and I think we got a lot of things right. I think the design of the character was fantastic. The way we did Ghost Rider as a tar-bubbling, black, charred creature was absolutely the right take on Ghost Rider. They’ve brought that character back on TV now, and he looks like the clean, vanilla, G-rated character again. That version really has no interest for me, but I do think a scary, rated-R, horror superhero movie is an awesome thing that should be done and I wish that Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance had been it.”
As of now, it is difficult to tell when will Ghost Rider’s next MCU appearance be. Television might be the better medium, but, you never know. Marvel might just stun us some day and make a proper Ghost Rider reboot in the next phase of MCU. However, that’s not an ideal option for now. Sadly, we only have the Nicolas Cage starrer Ghost Rider films, which, to be honest, are not good enough. The news was shared courtesy Flickering Myth.
