14 DAY TRIAL // With Bane threatening to bring Gotham and Batman to their knees in the upcoming “The Dark Knight Rises,” and Catwoman doing some serious damage on her own, it's interesting to hear what Warner Bros. had initially planned for the final installment in Chris Nolan's trilogy.
Screenwriter David Goyer tells the latest issue of Empire (via What Culture) that, at one point, in the early stages of production of the third Batman film, Warners and Nolan were talking about having The Riddler as the villain.
Moreover, they also talked about bringing Leonardo DiCaprio on board to play him.
“Obviously it’s gonna be The Riddler, and we want it to be Leonardo DiCaprio,” Goyer explains. He doesn't say when The Riddler was out of the picture and replaced by Bane and Catwoman.
However, word online has it that it might have been Nolan himself who dropped the idea since, back then, he was probably pitching “Inception” to Warners, so he had other plans for DiCaprio.
Still, it's interesting to think of what could have been.