There's been a lot of talk of "early negotiations" and will-he-won't-he-return questions about its star, but according to Columbia Pictures the deals are now done and dusted, and Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance 3D**, directed by Neveldine/Taylor and starring Nicolas Cage, will ride through your town with its head on fire in February 2012.
Nobody much liked the original, but apparently everybody saw it, since it raked in $270m worldwide, making a sequel all but inevitable. Clearly the powers behind the franchise (and no, we don't mean Satan) have been listening to the criticism though, and the directing team behind the Crank films and Gamer injecting some much-needed imaginative adrenaline into the sequel is an intriguing prospect. As is the idea of those guys trying to keep to a PG-13 certificate. No greased-up shotguns in this one.
Various scripts have been floating around for a while, so no plot-details are set in stone. We no longer seem to still be talking about David Goyer's Ghost Rider script from a decade or so ago though (with Johnny Blaze hounded by the demon Zarathos in the swamps of Louisiana): Cage told MTV recently that shooting would take place in Romania. Which, he hinted, "is where Dracula's castle is..."
Shooting is pencilled in for later this year.