Warner Bros. Wanted Leonardo DiCaprio to Play the Riddler in Christopher Nolan's DARK KNIGHT RISES

Dark Knight Trilogy screenwriter David S. Goyer recently shared a lot of insider details on several of the projects he’s worked on over the years. One of the things he confirmed in his interview with the Happy Sad Confused podcast, was that Warner Bros. did want Leonardo DiCaprio to play The Riddler in the third film of the trilogy, The Dark Knight Rises. Goyer said:

"We had all these pitches. I remember at The Dark Knight [premiere], the head of Warner Bros. said, ‘You gotta do the Riddler. You got to tell Chris, Leo as The Riddler,' That’s not the way we work – not to take anything away from him."

When Goyer says, “That’s not the way we work,” he was referring to the Hollywood trend of picking a villain and then building a movie around him. Goyer added:

"I had a sense – with the Spider-Man movies or when superhero movies started getting made and you had sequels – that the studios would always say ‘OK, who’s our villain of the next movie going to be? And let’s build a movie around that.’ Chris was staunchly against that… let’s figure out what story we want to tell [first], and what we thematically want to explore with Bruce. Then let’s figure out a villain that fits the story."

In the end, Nolan chose to focus on Bane (Tom Hardy) and Catwoman (Anne Hathaway), and he also introduced a new character played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt, John Blake, who would pick up Batman’s mantle in that universe.

While DiCaprio is a great actor, I just don’t see him in the role of The Riddler at all. That wouldn’t have been the best direction for the franchise. What do you think!?