After the success of Batman Begins and The Dark Knight, a lot was at stake when Christopher Nolan put together the final chapter of Dark Knight Rises, and most of us would agree that it all came together as well as it could under the circumstances.
But of course there is a lot that happened behind the scenes that we haven't heard about, at least until now and during an interview on the Happy Sad Confused podcast revealed the film's producer David S. Goyer recently stated that Warner Bros. initially pressured Nolan to cast Leonardo DiCaprio as The Riddler, and that the final film would focus on him as the villain.
"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,'"
"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, it was Tom Hardy and the muscular Bane who became the villain, but the idea of the Riddler as the film's arch-villain is definitely an interesting one, don't you think?
Would you have liked to see the Riddler as the villain in Dark Knight Rises instead of Bane, and do you think DiCaprio would have fit the role?