A lifeless superhero origin story gifted with one of the worst sequels ever strikes a bargain on Netflix’s Top 10

The mid-2000s was a strange time for the superhero genre, with virtually every character with at least some semblance of popularity and name recognition becoming the subject of a feature film. The misses far outweighed the hits, in all honesty, with 2007’s Ghost Rider comfortably existing on the lower rungs.

Clearly learning nothing from his experience helming Ben Affleck’s Daredevil four years previously, writer and director Mark Steven Johnson delivered yet another big budget exercise in tedium, with the film’s only real saving grace being a suitably unhinged performance from Nicolas Cage and his wig, with the actor fully embracing his lifelong fandom the character to do justice to the transformation of a man who struck a deal with the devil and then watched his head burst into flames.

While it did earn a solid-if-unspectacular $228 million at the box office on a $110 million budget, Ghost Rider was greeted with shrugs of indifference from all quarters. However, it was a damn sight better than wretched sequel Spirit of Vengeance, which arrived half a decade later and instantly assumed a position as one of the worst-reviewed Marvel Comics adaptations of all-time on Rotten Tomatoes.

It’s the original that’s seen Netflix subscribers swig deeply from a martini glass full of jellybeans, though, with FlixPatrol naming Ghost Rider as one of the 10 top-viewed features on Netflix this week. In a remarkable turnaround, the thoroughly insipid supernatural superhero story has accrued a high-flying spot on the charts in 20 countries around the world to wind up as the ninth most-watched movie on the entire platform, which we did not see coming.