It's been a while since we had any updates on Johnny Blaze's return to the big screen, but Brian Taylor (one-half of binary Crank directing entity Neveldine/Taylor) has shared a few thoughts on Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance with Movieline. His statements might just put to rest any fears you have following the first instalment. Maybe.
Is it a reboot or a sequel? Like The Incredible Hulk (and, by the sound of things, the next Daredevil movie) it seems to be kind of both. "We’re just looking at it as an evolution," explains Taylor. "The movie takes place years later. We’re not disowning the first movie but this Ghost Rider is an evolved form of the previous Ghost Rider. We basically completely re-envisioned the whole start of the character. The whole mythology behind the Ghost Rider that existed in the comic books never really made sense to me, so we sort of had to re-engineer the entire back-story into something new. That mythology never got delved into in the first movie, anyway, [but] we really get into that."
That enhanced focus on the demon Zarathos has involved a whole different approach to playing the character for returning star Nicolas Cage, who's now playing Blaze and the Ghost Rider, instead of leaving the Flaming Skull up to the FX guys and the stuntmen. "Shooting action and car crashes and all that stuff is boring," says Taylor, "but shooting a Nic Cage performance is a total adrenaline rush."
And talk of adrenaline leads neatly to N/T's signature franchise Crank. Jason Statham lamented last year that the poor box office of Crank 2 made a threequel unlikely. But, says Taylor, "Don't think we aren't talking about it. It was almost going to happen but the schedule wasn’t right and the money wasn’t right. It’s kind of like that movie has to get willed into existence at some point, by enough people who want to see it."
What's left after adrenal-gland poisoning and stolen hearts? We're voting for full body transplant. Crankenstein, anyone?
