Ryan Gosling Pitched His Own ‘Ghost Rider’ Movie to Marvel as Studio Slows Down Output to Restore Quality: ‘When Quantity Is So Much, You Get Spread Thin’

Marvel’s buzzy Comic-Con presentation put two huge comic book movie tentpoles on the studio’s 2028 release calendar: “Black Panther 3,” featuring the debut of David Jonnson as T’Challa II/Toussaint, and “Ghost Rider,” starring Ryan Gosling in the title role. The announcement means “Spider-Man: Brand New day,” “Avengers: Doomsday” and “Avengers: Secret Wars” will be the only Marvel movies released in theaters between now and 2028. In fact, “Secret Wars” is the only 2027 Marvel movie release.

“A lot of it is a strategy we’ve talked about for a while, of focusing on quality,” Marvel Studios boss Kevin Feige told Empire magazine at Comic-Con about the sparser release calendar. “We always try to focus on quality, but when quantity is so much, you get spread thin. We didn’t want to be spread thin, and the Avengers is as important as it comes. And ‘Secret Wars’… is a setup in and of itself to the future, to what’s next. So really, it was landing those two movies and setting up 2028, of which we’ve revealed two of them so far, ‘Ghost Rider’ and ‘Panther III.'”

With the television series “VisionQuest” arriving on Disney+ in October, the Marvel Cinematic Universe will be getting a total of four new entries across two years. That’s a massive slow down from the exhaustive output Marvel previously delivered across theaters and streaming. There were six Marvel movie and TV projects in 2023 alone, for instance. Feige previously admitted to Variety that Marvel’s “over-expansion” into Disney+ streaming content was the start of “quantity trumping quality” at the studio, which he now seems to be actively course-correcting.