If you’ve seen the first Ghost Rider movie from 2007 starring Nicholas Cage, you probably never thought we’d be … um … “lucky”? … enough to see a sequel. Well, here it comes!

Yes, it’s true, Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance has begun filming in Bucharest, Romania for a Feb. 17, 2012 release, five years and one day since the original.  The first one had a budget of $110 million and ended up doing $228.7 million worldwide, meaning that it really made next to money, and possibly didn’t even break even.

The thing is, Sony has a reason for making this sequel to an unwatchable disaster, and that is to keep Marvel from getting the rights to the character back.

In the days before Marvel was its own film studio, it would license its characters out to various studios with a clause that if X number of years passed without anything new coming out for the character the rights would revert back to Marve to shop around.  Well, since the comic book company is now its own movie studio, those studios that have character rights don’t want them to revert back, and that’s why we’re seeing reboots of Spider-Man and the Fantastic Four, and the most unneeded sequel in history to Ghost Rider.

Basically these companies would rather pump out bad movie after bad movie instead of letting Marvel, who actually knows what to do with the characters, have a chance to make money with them.  It’s an unfortunate situation, but one we’re stuck with for the foreseeable future.

Too bad there isn’t a “your movies suck, we get the character back” clause.