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Before Bane, the head of Warner Bros. wanted the third Christopher Nolan Batman movie to star Leonardo DiCaprio as the Riddler
Instead of DiCaprio as The Riddler, we got Tom Hardy's take on Bane, which doesn't feel like a bad trade, in hindsight
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In the wake of The Dark Knight’s success, the Internet went wild trying to guess what Christopher Nolan’s next Batman movie would be about and, more importantly, who would be the villain tasked with following up Heath Ledger’s Joker. Turns out, it wasn’t just fans who were obsessed with fan-casting their favorite Batman villains – the head of Warner Bros. was passionate about seeing Leonardo DiCaprio as The Riddler in The Dark Knight Rises.
“I remember, after The Dark Knight, the head of Warner Bros. at the premiere said ‘You gotta do the Riddler. Leo is The Riddler!’” David S. Goyer explained on an episode of the Happy Sad Confused podcast. This was well before work on a follow-up had even begun, so neither Goyer, who wrote the scripts, nor director Christopher Nolan knew exactly who they wanted to feature in the next Batman film. That didn’t stop that particular executive from putting a passionate case forward. “’You gotta tell Chris – Leo is The Riddler!’”
As interesting as Leonardo DiCaprio’s take on The Riddler would have been, Goyer says that he and Nolan didn’t want to design the whole movie around a Batman villain; instead, they wanted to decide on the story they wanted to tell and pick a Batman villain to fit it. “I just [said], ‘Dude, that’s not, that’s not the way we work.’”
So we’ll probably never get to see Leonardo DiCaprio’s take on The Riddler – or any other Batman villain – but it is good to know that even the executives in charge of these movie studios are susceptible to getting overexcited by a bit of fan-casting.
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