After Disney's $4 billion acquisition of Marvel, any movie studio owning rights to a Marvel property went scrambling to continue development or risk having those rights reclaimed by Marvel and its new parent company.
According to a report from Variety, Columbia is now actively pursuing a sequel to Ghost Rider, and has brought in Batman Begins and The Dark Knight scribe David Goyer to work out the story and supervise writers for the Nicloas Cage vehicle. Goyer says he hasn't officially signed on for the sequel yet, but plans are in place to base the sequel on a Ghost Rider script Goyer wrote years ago. Director Mark Steven Johnson used his own script for the original Ghost Rider.
Columbia isn't the only studio worried about losing rights to Marvel characters. Fox is rebooting The Fantastic Four and every possible X-Men movie, while Sony is already writing the scripts for Spider-Man 5 and 6.
Having Goyer attached to Ghost Rider 2 would likely be considered a positive move for Cage, who is returning for the sequel and has already stated that he is hoping to go in a "whole other direction."