There are bad movies, and then there are the kind of gloriously unhinged bad movies that only Nicolas Cage can deliver. Both Ghost Rider films now belong firmly in the latter category, and they’ve just landed on Tubi for free — no subscription, no rental fee, just a couch and a tolerance for CGI flames.
For the uninitiated: Cage plays Johnny Blaze, a stunt motorcyclist who sells his soul to the devil and gets stuck with an unusual side effect. By night, his head becomes a burning skull, his bike morphs into a hellish chopper, and he doles out supernatural justice as the Ghost Rider. It’s a Marvel property, but this is not the polished, interconnected Marvel we know today — this is the wilder, messier era of comic-book adaptations.
Critics were, to put it kindly, unimpressed on release. Both movies bombed with the review crowd and split audiences right down the middle. So why bother revisiting them now?
Two words: Nicolas Cage. Whatever you think of the scripts, the pacing or the special effects, Cage commits with the sort of fearless, over-the-top intensity that has made him a cult icon. His performances here are the very definition of divisive — some viewers cringe, others cheer, and plenty do both in the same scene. That electricity is precisely what makes these films worth streaming, especially when they cost nothing to watch.
Tubi, for its part, has quietly become a home for exactly this kind of guilty-pleasure catalog. The ad-supported service leans into cult classics, forgotten flops and genre oddities that don’t always make it onto the bigger subscription platforms. A double bill of flaming-skull vengeance fits right in.
Here’s what you get if you decide to dive in:
- Two full films in the Ghost Rider franchise, both starring Nicolas Cage as Johnny Blaze
- Free to stream on Tubi, backed by ads rather than a monthly fee
- A superhero saga from an era before Marvel movies became a precision-engineered machine
Think of it as a time capsule. Before every comic-book film was stress-tested by focus groups and stitched into a decade-long master plan, studios were still throwing strange, uneven experiments at the wall to see what stuck. The Ghost Rider movies are one of those experiments — flawed, loud and undeniably memorable, largely because of the man wearing the flaming skull.
If you’ve never seen them, they make for a perfect low-stakes weekend watch. If you have, well, you already know whether Cage’s brand of chaos is your thing. Either way, the price is right, and the flames are back.
