Let’s all just sit down and take a deep breath.

You, too, Philip Seymour Hoffman.

Then we’ll head over to El Nopal for a couple of burritos and a Mountain Dew or two.

And then back across the street for a vanilla malt at Zesto’s and maybe a pork BBQ sandwich.

Okay.

So.

MTV says this:

Michael Caine Says Johnny Depp Is The Riddler, Philip Seymour Hoffman Is The Penguin

I’ll wait here while you read it.

Done?

Okay.

So.

This obviously sounds like the scoop of all scoops, but it’s also nothing more than speculation from all parties involved.

It’s just way too early to be talking about which new characters might be in the next Batman movie, much less who might be playing them, given that writer/director Christopher Nolan is still quite deservedly off the grid.

Furthermore, the hardest working Batman fan on the planet, Bill “Jett” Ramey, put a link on his Batman on Film site to this blurb from the Toronto Film Festival, where Jay Stone posed the question to Philip Seymour Awesome himself and got this response:

Hoffman says no one has ever called him, but it’s possible that someone wants him to play the part and the rumour is being floated to capture his interest. If so, he isn’t saying yes. But he isn’t saying no either.
“I don’t think so,” he says, before he softened the stand a bit.
“I grew up a comic book fan, so I love that stuff. I love going to that stuff. I think what they’re doing with that whole Batman story is really true to what that whole Batman thing has always been. It’s one of the darkest origins of a superhero, to get all nerdy and geeky on you. That character sees his parents gunned down as a young child: I remember when I was a kid reading that story, so seeing it now come to life as the dark tale that it really is as an intense, really dark, very visceral, adult tale that they’re doing now, all the great work people are doing on it, of course I wouldn’t say, ‘Well, no, no no.’
“But I don’t know the reality of it, so I wouldn’t say ‘yes’ to you.”

That’s actually an interesting answer.

But, as Bill points out, the Hoffman rumors have been around for a long, long time, so take that as you will, too.

Anyway.

My vote for The Riddler is still Casey Affleck, based on the bad-ass back-to-back work he did in Gone Baby Gone and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. Take the confidence from the former and the creepiness (which built into confidence) from the latter and you’ve got one scary customer who could put Batman through some truly twisted mind games.

But I’d certainly welcome Johnny Depp in anything.

And Philip Seymour Awesome can also play The Penguin any time he likes.

They’d just need to make the character more realistic, like they did (to magnificent effect) with The Joker in The Dark Knight.

To my knowledge, Warner Bros. hasn’t released a denial of any of this.

And we do know that Johnny Depp thinks it would be “a fun gig.”

But.

As always, let’s consider everything rumor until a Warner Bros. press release says it’s fact.

And it’s going to be a long, long time before anything like that happens.

And now I want to go see The Dark Knight again.

Who’s with me?