Ryan Gosling Wins Comic-Con: MCU Handed Him the Flame
David Jonsson — who spent Alien: Romulus being extraordinary in the dark — was announced as T'Challa's son in Black Panther 3, set for 2028.
Ryan Gosling Wins Comic-Con: MCU Handed Him the Flame
Comic-Con had its moment, and it arrived in the shape of Ryan Gosling pulling on a leather jacket nobody asked for but everyone immediately wanted. The announcement that Gosling will play Ghost Rider in the MCU — reuniting with Shawn Levy, the director who shepherded him through *Deadpool & Wolverine* — landed the way these things rarely do anymore: like it actually made sense. Gosling spent years reportedly pitching this himself, which is either the most endearing thing a 45-year-old movie star can do or a warning sign that he understood the assignment before Marvel did. Either way, he got there.
The rest of the Hall H weekend was a masterclass in managed chaos. David Jonsson — who spent *Alien: Romulus* being extraordinary in the dark — was announced as T'Challa's son in *Black Panther 3*, set for 2028. A grown prince, a new chapter, a casting choice that suggests Marvel has at least remembered that interesting actors exist. Jonsson is not a safe pick. That's the only reason to be optimistic.
Then there was the Netflix adjacency of the weekend's toy-to-film industrial complex: John Cena and Jessica Biel starring in *Matchbox The Movie* for Apple Original Films, directed by Sam Hargrave of *Extraction* fame. The trailer exists. It is exactly what you think it is. Globe-trotting. Explosions. Cars that are probably sentient. There is nothing wrong with this and nothing surprising about it, which is its own kind of achievement.
Callum Turner introduced a teaser for *Neuromancer* at the Apple TV+ panel — William Gibson's cyberpunk architecture finally getting the screen treatment it has been promised for thirty years — and the room apparently lost its mind in the appropriate direction. Turner has the kind of face that belongs in neon-soaked corridors, which is not nothing.
The genuinely strange footnote: *Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves* has a sequel script, fully written, that may never be made for "financial reasons." A film that was good — actually good, funny and warm and clever — sitting in a drawer because the numbers didn't perform the way a franchise number is supposed to perform. Hollywood will greenlight a sentient toy car movie before it protects the things that worked.
That's not cynicism. That's just the architecture of the room.
