I don’t need to tell anyone that 2012 was a game-changer for superhero cinema. Propelled by the billion-dollar success of “The Avengers,” that year saw the MCU evolve from promising upstart to the biggest franchise on the planet. Marvel Studios’ competitors would then proceed to spend the remainder of the decade chasing after them, with Sony scrambling to reconfigure its 2012 “Spider-Man” reboot, “The Amazing Spider-Man,” as the springboard for a separate universe composed of spinoffs and sequels. That also meant a moderately lucrative franchise like “Ghost Rider” was suddenly small potatoes for the studio, which is why Sony allowed the rights to revert to Marvel Studios in 2013.
Rather than continue the adventures of Cage’s Johnny Blaze or recast the role, Marvel Studios elected to focus on Robbie Reyes, a different iteration of Ghost Rider who debuted on the pages of “All-New Ghost Rider” #1 in 2014. Gabriel Luna would go on to play the character in Marvel Television’s “Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.” season 4 in 2016, quickly becoming a fan-favorite and almost starring in his own spinoff series. Of course, that was before Marvel Television was folded into Marvel Studios in 2019, at which point the spinoff was canceled along with several other MCU-adjacent projects that were percolating under Marvel’s TV division at the time. Since then, it’s been radio silence on the “Ghost Rider” front, so far as what the House of Ideas has in mind for the future (if anything).