Two Wheels On Screen #3: In 2026, Hollywood Is Shooting Motorcycles Again

On 26 July 2026, in Hall H at San Diego Comic-Con, Ryan Gosling was introduced as Ghost Rider. Shawn Levy directs, and the film arrives in 2028. "This is a character I've wanted to play for a very long time," Gosling told the crowd. It will be the character's first theatrical outing under Marvel Studios, following the two films Nicolas Cage made at Sony in 2007 and 2012. I did not read this as a standalone piece of news. This year, motorcycles are being filmed from three directions at once: the true story, the entertainment, and the myth. All three have different teams behind them and different audiences in mind. And yet, in the same year, they are all pointed at the same machine. A strange year indeed.

The first came from the side of the true story. Amazon MGM Studios, working with Brad Pitt's Plan B, is shooting a film built around the Isle of Man TT. Reid Carolin directs, with Channing Tatum and Eve Hewson starring. Filming began on the island on 22 May 2026 and rolled during the practice week of the actual TT, on real course roads including Glencrutchery Road and the Mountain Road. Carolin has said his job is "to capture the love of the race and also the love of the place," and that what he wants on film is the way the island comes alive for race week. That is the crux of it. Not a set, but a real public road during a real week. Somewhere in this film there will be a moment where the motorcycle stops being a symbol and becomes a place. Borrowing a real public road during a real week is, for a production, nothing but constraint: you cannot move the weather, the session times, or the lives of the people on the island. If they chose it anyway, then what this film actually wants is not images of speed but the air of that one week.

The second came from precisely the opposite direction. On 3 August it was reported that Alan Ritchson had teamed with Netflix to develop a heist thriller set in the world of MotoGP. Chris Morgan writes — the man who scripted several of the Fast & Furious films. A crew of motorcycle thieves is stealing priceless antiquities around the world, and Interpol hires a onetime MotoGP prodigy to catch them; the ringleader, it turns out, may be his younger brother, long believed dead. The pitch is Fast & Furious on motorcycles, and MotoGP is officially consulting. Honestly, I braced myself a little. But remembering what that franchise did for four-wheeled culture, it cannot be waved away. The width of a doorway sometimes travels further than the polish of the work behind it. What made me brace was that a heist frame risks pinning the motorcycle into the role of a fast, convenient tool for stealing. Then again, Morgan is the writer who pushed the car all the way into a metaphor for family in the four-wheeled films. If there is a place to put one's hopes, it is there.

One note here as a Japanese reader. In Japan, stories with a motorcycle at the center have long been built on the manga side. Works like "Aitsu to Lullaby" and "Bakuon!!" accumulated, on paper and without a live-action budget, a whole craft for writing a machine as a character. Hollywood is now attempting the same thing with live-action money and a real race. This is not a question of which is superior. But how a decades-old paper craft for giving a machine a personality translates into live action — that is where my interest gathers.

And the third, Ghost Rider, comes from the side of myth. A flaming skull and a single motorcycle — the sheer strength of that image has survived more than forty years, quite apart from whether the Cage films worked. I think that image survived because it is not a picture of fire but a picture of an act — of riding on, with the fire on your back. Without the motorcycle, the design does not hold together at all. I regard the failure of those films as this: they let the motorcycle fall into being a prop for spectacle. A burning bike photographs beautifully. But a machine that only photographs beautifully never takes up residence in the audience's memory. As I wrote in the second installment, the reason the Z in "Aitsu to Lullaby" is so strong is that it was a character. The three films set in motion in 2026 enter through separate doors — true story, entertainment, myth — and arrive at the same question. Is the motorcycle on screen a tool, or a character? For someone who loved motorcycles before he ever knew them, this is not somebody else's business. I intend to take until 2028 to check the answers, slowly.