One Of Marvel's Biggest Anti-Heroes Was Almost In Deadpool & Wolverine

This post contains spoilers for "Deadpool & Wolverine."

"Deadpool & Wolverine" uses the power of a well-placed nostalgic cameo and weaponizes them in the same way "Spider-Man: No Way Home" does, delivering a hugely entertaining experience that also serves as a love letter to Marvel's past. The film is a thank you to audiences that stuck with the genre through the decades, through the good movies and the bad. 

From turning Deadpool and Wolverine's journey into the unapologetically gay movie Marvel keeps failing to deliver, to giving one of the Marvel Cinematic Universe's most solemn actors a chance to go back to a beloved yet goofy role that culminates into a parade of profanity echoing Steve Martin's car rental scene in "Planes, Trains and Automobiles," the movie does pick its cameos and roles really well in order to deliver something outrageously funny. It's how we saw not just the return of Blade and Elektra as a homage to and appreciation of the past, but also how Channing Tatum finally got his chance to play Gambit. 

But as many cameos as there are in "Deadpool & Wolverine," there could have been many more. One cameo that was ultimately scrapped involved one of Marvel's biggest anti-heroes from one of Marvel's biggest flops: Ghost Rider.

Speaking with Collider, Ryan Reynolds confessed that the team did think of bringing in Nicolas Cage to reprise his role as Ghost Rider, saying that the idea of that cameo "came to a conversation for sure."

The year before the MCU kicked off with "Iron Man," we had one of the last uniquely bold and very weird superhero movies that were prominent in the 2000s with "Ghost Rider." Now imagine Nicolas Cage going full Cage in "Deadpool & Wolverine," wearing all leather, wielding a fire whip, doing a bit of body horror, and mercilessly killing people in a way that makes Cassandra Nova ripping off Johnny Storm's skin off look like a PG scene. 

Ghost Rider would've fit right in with the other cameos in "Deadpool & Wolverine," as it would have come from a movie that was bad but has gained fans over time. It helps that Ghost Rider hasn't been seen since the sequel, except for a brief TV role in "Agents of SHIELD," a result of the Marvel Creative Committee deciding that characters like Ghost Rider and Daredevil would not appear in movies, but were left for a new TV arm of Marvel Entertainment in the early 2010s.

Still, Ghost Rider is not in "Deadpool & Wolverine," and there is a very good reason for that (and a good reason it's unlikely the Cage iteration will appear in future MCU projects). This movie is mostly a love letter and a goodbye to the 20th Century Fox era of Marvel movies — its successes, failures, and other weird titles. The one exception is Blade, who appeared in movies distributed by New Line Cinema, but even that can be forgiven for the fact that "Blade" is the movie that proved Marvel characters could sustain hit movies. "Ghost Rider," a movie from Sony Pictures, doesn't really fit this framing. And if we were to extend the possibility of even more cameos, the most interesting option would be Ang Lee's "Hulk," which totally deserves a reappraisal, but would have encountered similar rights issues since that version of the character appeared in a movie distributed by Universal.