“The studio was afraid”: Before Wes Bentley’s Blackheart, Nicolas Cage’s Ghost Rider Movie Wanted a Villain That DC Fans Have Repeatedly Claimed is a Cheap Batman Rogues Gallery Knockoff

Nicolas Cage has always had a soft spot for devils and tragedies. The actor’s work has always veered far from the mainstream Hollywood recipe, often encroaching into territories that, for the lack of a better word, can only be labeled as weird. Ironically, Cage built a reputation out of his eccentricities, making his roles work out spectacularly in his favor.

Through the years, Cage has established himself as an unimpeachable figure on the fringes of Hollywood, an A-lister by the power of his dramatic work and yet ridiculous enough to be remembered more for his role in the 27% rated Ghost Rider than the 97% rated Pig. It is his work in the expansion of the comic book fantasy that makes him a living legend to this day.

Nicolas Cage’s Ghost Rider Sets a Record Straight for Marvel

Growing up as an avid Marvel comics fan, Nicola Coppola, nephew to The Godfather director Francis Ford Coppola, changed his surname after being inspired by the superhero Luke Cage. As such, when Marvel came calling, he wasn’t the one to turn down the role of the devil spawn on a motorbike.

But the work was not so cut and dry for Ghost Rider director, Mark Steven Johnson. His primary responsibility, after getting the casting for the hero down, was to introduce an equally daring villain to the screens in the first live-action adaptation of Johnny Blaze. Considering how Marvel’s rights in the early 2000s were still all over the place, the options available were already limited in their scope and opportunity.

Speaking about his conception of the villain in the movie, Johnson revealed in an interview with ComicBook:

In my first pass at the script, the villain was Scarecrow. I always loved the Marvel version of Scarecrow and thought he would have made a really cool and sinister adversary for Ghost Rider. But the studio was afraid it would get confused with the DC Scarecrow and so we ended up with Blackheart.

That was a tough character to crack. The Son of the Devil. Wes Bentley did a great job. As did Peter Fonda as Mephisto. But I never got the story right. A hero is only as good as his villain. And we never quite got the villain and the villain agenda down.

Although a live-action Scarecrow would have been an interesting contest against Ghost Rider, Wes Bentley’s depiction of Blackheart established the character as a formidable opponent in the realm of supervillains. As far as evil goes, Mephisto is the ultimate Marvel villain of all time. However, Bentley’s role displayed an interesting revamp from the previously considered Marvel’s version of Scarecrow.

Ebenezer Laughton vs. Dr. Jonathan Crane

The world of comics has always been rigged to the same wires, with inspiration originating from the same volatile world around the readers and the creators. With both the Marvel and DC universes evolving in parallel, their storylines have often given birth to character doppelgängers. Since the 1960s, heroes and villains mirrored each other on the pages of both rival companies.

Captain America/Superman, Iron Man/Batman, Thor/Wonder Woman, Namor/Aquaman, Quicksilver/Flash, Doctor Strange/Doctor Fate, Captain Marvel/Green Lantern, Scarlet Witch/Enchantress, Punisher/Peacemaker… the list goes on. However, when it comes to villains, an interesting evolution can be witnessed in the case of one particular Batman Rogues Gallery miscreant.

Marvel’s Scarecrow aka Ebenezer Laughton, created by Stan Lee and Don Heck for the March 1964 issue of Tales of Suspense #51, closely resembled DC’s infamous Batman villain who was created by the legendary duo Bob Kane and Bill Finger for the Fall 1941 issue of World’s Finest Comics.

But while the DC character could quite literally paralyze and kill a person out of fear-induced paranoia, Marvel’s supervillain debuted as a contortionist, master acrobat, and an overall cheap knockoff of the Rogues Gallery villain.

To introduce the character in Nicolas Cage’s film after Christopher Nolan’s already-astounding vision in the Dark Knight trilogy would be a leviathan task to follow up on, especially considering the overarching shadow cast by Cillian Murphy’s formidable portrayal of Dr. Jonathan Crane aka Scarecrow.

Ghost Rider is available to buy/rent on Prime Video and Apple TV.