MCU’s Ghost Rider Would Have Had Big Team-Ups If They Kept Him Around

In the quick period of time that Gabriel Luna spent showing on Agents of SHIELD as Robbie Reyes, the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s first live-action Ghost Rider, he shortly turned one of many collection’ most fascinating characters for a number of causes. In addition to entering into the story as a formidable counterbalance to the remainder of its established heroes, Robbie Reyes additionally introduced magic to Agents of SHIELD at a time when the MCU was simply starting to broach the subject of the supernatural.

After initially being launched as a near-villain, Agents of SHIELD’s Ghost Rider went on to affix the profitable workforce briefly earlier than exiting in its fourth season after serving to to take down Aida. Back when Agents of SHIELD was nonetheless airing, the MCU was a drastically completely different place, unfold throughout Marvel Studios’ movies in addition to episodic collection that lived on Netflix, Hulu, and ABC. Ghost Rider’s presence on the ABC collection—and the character’s reputation an entire—left open the likelihood that he would possibly make the soar to a solo collection in due time that may proceed Reyes’ story and additional flesh out his chunk of the MCU. But earlier than any of that had an opportunity to come back to fruition, issues at Marvel Studios modified drastically following the Hollywood large’s acquisition of twenty first Century Fox in 2019. Along with the return of the cinematic rights to characters just like the X-Men and the Fantastic Four, the company merger heralded the dissolution of the studio’s outdated tv arm headed up by Jeph Loeb.

Since then, Marvel’s introduced a lot of the manufacturing for its collection like WandaImaginative and prescient and the remainder of the Disney+ bunch in-house, and the futures of characters from the outdated Marvel Television period have been in query. Though the studio’s not too long ago performed coy about whether or not it’s enthusiastic about bringing any of them again, that wasn’t at all times the case in keeping with Luna. In a current interview with Comicbook concerning the cinematic histories of a number of Ghost Riders, Luna reiterated how, when he first signed on to play Robbie Reyes, the concept was at all times to have the character’s story proceed in a derivative collection. Marvel was so ready to maneuver ahead with the spinoff, Luna mentioned, that the studio shortly moved to invoke the “hold clause” on his contract—paying him to be out there and able to start manufacturing the second every thing lined up.

“A year goes by and we were still trying to find the right showrunner and meanwhile they’re picking up my hold again, so every six months, they would give me my fee to keep them in first position,” Luna mentioned. “And I just really loved that character. I really loved the people I was working with, so I elected to grant them that, always with the promise that we’d get there. We’d get this show across the finish line.”

Right up till the ink dried on the Disney/Fox deal, Luna and the remainder of the Ghost Rider crew have been in full-production mode, and believed that the undertaking would seemingly pan out. Luna, who mentioned that he’d return the cash Marvel gave him if it meant Ghost Rider may really exist, mentioned that the collection that might-have-been would have adopted Robbie to Los Angeles as he encountered—shocker—a number of otherworldly villains like Lilith, the large dangerous of 2K Games’ Marvel’s Midnight Suns (the place Reyes additionally occurs to look).

“I remember when I was pitching stuff, I had a really awesome idea that would have kept Robbie in LA and that would have pitted us against classic Ghost Rider villains,” Luna mentioned, referring to Lilith. “And I think it would have led up to her being the big bad of what we were initially trying to start, which was this four-show, very Defenders-esque thing that was going to happen.”

Though Helstrom (RIP) by no means got here wherever even close to to crossing over with any of Marvel’s different live-action reveals, the concept of an MCU Robbie Reyes crossing paths with Daimon and Ana makes a good quantity of sense, particularly while you recall how expressly magical all of Hulu’s early Marvel reveals turned in the direction of the tip. In its closing season, Hulu’s Runaways introduced Morgan le Fay into the image as an enormous dangerous who almost managed to overcome the world as a result of the workforce combating her had so little expertise within the methods of magic. Along along with her personal innate powers, Morgan possessing a duplicate of the Darkhold was one of many issues that made her formidable within the present. The Darkhold’s presence in Runaways was additionally one thing that advised the opportunity of there being extra within the pipeline for a much bigger, televised story involving magical characters—particularly for the reason that e-book had final been seen on Agents of SHIELD in Robbie Reyes’ possession as he left Earth for hell within the present’s season 4 finale.

More not too long ago, the Darkhold ended up in Wanda Maximoff’s fingers on the finish of WandaImaginative and prescient, and it looks like the tome will seemingly issue into how the Scarlet Witch turns into, you already know, an challenge in Doctor Strange within the Multiverse of Madness. The probabilities of it someway touchdown again with Robbie Reyes appear slim. Still, although, Luna seems to be again on the unrealized Ghost Rider as “a great opportunity missed for a character that was truly beloved and, for a Mexican-American superhero to be prominently displayed, ‘American’ being the operative word.”

Wondering the place our RSS feed went? You can decide the brand new up one right here.