Ryan Gosling has committed to playing Ghost Rider in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, which means Marvel has finally accepted that it needs someone who has watched a film made after 2015 to inhabit one of its characters. The actor announced this at San Diego Comic-Con with the enthusiasm of a man who has “wanted to play for a very long time” — the universal tell of someone who saw the IP, looked at the current roster of MCU performances, and thought: I can fix this.
Gosling’s involvement is objectively the most interesting casting decision Marvel has made since it realized that Taika Waititi could direct. He is not a franchise guy. He made a film about a stunt driver who mostly drives. He starred in a three-hour meditation on loneliness set in space. He played a replicant having an existential crisis. The MCU’s standard move is to hire actors who have demonstrated zero previous interest in anything that requires subtlety, then ask them to carry $200 million in explosives while delivering exposition.
What does this actually mean for the MCU? Probably nothing good and everything weird. Ghost Rider is a character with a flaming skull who rides a motorcycle and yells about vengeance — exactly the kind of premise that demands either complete earnestness or complete self-awareness, and Marvel has spent fifteen years proving it can do neither. Gosling will do both simultaneously, which will confuse everyone involved and somehow still underperform at the box office.
The real question is whether Marvel hired Gosling to elevate the material or whether Gosling finally got tired of watching what the MCU does to talented people and decided to infiltrate it from the inside. San Diego Comic-Con applauded. They always do. They have no idea what they just witnessed.