Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance flamed out this weekend with a meek $22 million start at 3,174 locations (2,352 of which showed the movie in 3D). That opening is less than half the three-day start of the original Ghost Rider on the same weekend in 2007 ($45.4 million), which is a nearly unprecedented drop for a sequel.
An abundance of factors contributed to Ghost Rider's decline. While Nicolas Cage has been getting away with the over-the-top shtick for a while now, his star has faded in recent years with an abundance of bizarre and disappointing projects like The Sorcerer's Apprentice, Season of the Witch and Drive Angry. More important than Cage, though, is the fact that audiences probably weren't all that interested in a sequel to Ghost Rider in the first place. The original movie has a 5.2 rating on IMDb, which is atrocious considering fanboy fare usually gets a break on the site.
The nail in the coffin, so to speak, could have been the lengthy time off between the original and the sequel. As odd as this may sound, a good comparison is Happy Feet Two. Both Spirit of Vengeance and Happy Feet Two added 3D and were released exactly five years after their first movies. Happy Feet Two's opening was 51 percent of Happy Feet's, while Spirit of Vengeance's was 49 percent of Ghost Rider's. This seems to indicate that unless you have a monster of a brand (even with four years off, The Dark Knight Rises will probably be in good shape), you really shouldn't wait too long on the sequel.
One bright spot is that the budget for Spirit of Vengeance was just $57 million, or around half of the first movie's $110 million budget (our trusted source at Sony originally reported Ghost Rider 2's budget at $75 million, but said he accidently switched the numbers and sent along the revised figure on Sunday). Regardless, Ghost Rider is an established brand and the movie had a robust marketing effort, so it really should have opened much higher than $22 million.