There’s no place to be a journalist, especially a freelance one, like New York City. The sheer number of ‘press events’ held to promote everything from movies to DVDs to flat screen TVs, phones and video games is staggering. And they’ve all got free food and alcohol. Seriously, it’s like going to ‘brunch’ by hitting Whole Foods to eat samples, except the samples are little BBQ burgers and entire lobsters and they’ll give you as many Maker’s & Cokes as you can stomach.
Which explains why the guys from IGN were at Sony’s ‘Higher Definition’ press event. Mark Steven Johnson was also there, and predictably, the IGN kids got him to talk about the movie everyone is waiting for: Ghost Rider 2. I bet the free alcohol helped.
Some of his quotes are pure Oh Don Piano:
We’re talking about it, yeah, talking about it.
and
For sure I’d still want to be involved because I love it, and I love everybody involved with it.
…which means ‘I might not direct, but I’ll still take a check.’
Johnson goes on to theorize on the villain for the theoretical second film. "…in my first script it was Scarecrow who was the villain, but then I heard that they were going to put him in the Batman
movie. But now having seen it, he wasn’t really in it that much. And
the Marvel Scarecrow is really pretty cool, so I think he’d be an
excellent villain. I also think there’s a character named Blackout that
could be interesting, [and] there’s Vengeance from the later comics."
There’s more at IGN, including a bit of blame-shifting for the first film’s quality (the Ghost Rider FX shifted budget away from the action scenes, and perhaps Cage’s willingness to act) and also a hint that Preacher is still a going concern at HBO. But IGN knows that Preacher is what we really want to read about, so they’re stringing the good info on that project out into another article to be published in the future.