UPDATE

Click here to read who the mystery female character might be! And it sounds like we’ll definitely have a Lois Lane, too. The original story remains below the line.

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As our friend Jamie Williams pointed out on Think McFly Think earlier this week, the sudden (and on a Sunday, no less) announcement that Henry Cavill had been cast as Superman was a blessing that spared us weeks and possibly even months of speculation about who would portray the Man of Steel in the upcoming film directed by Zack Snyder (300, Watchmen, Sucker Punch) and produced by Christopher Nolan (Memento, The Prestige, Inception, Batman Begins, The Dark Knight, The Dark Knight Rises).

Rampant concern and conjecture, however, have exploded around the casting of Lois Lane — if she’s even in the movie at all, which has come into question over the last 24 hours.

Let’s take it from the top.

First, What’s Playing released a list of actresses they said they’d heard were in contention to play Lois. They state that Anne Hathaway had been the top pick “from day one,” but of course she chose instead to play Selina “Catwoman” Kyle in Nolan’s Batman finale, The Dark Knight Rises.

(She’d have made an amazing Lois, by the way.)

That supposedly left a list including Malin Akerman, Dianna Agron, Jessica Biel, Rachel McAdams, and Kristen Stewart.

Akerman was the best part of the obnoxious Couples Retreat and worked with Snyder as the second Silk Spectre in Watchmen. She’s beautiful and funny.

I don’t watch Glee, so I don’t know anything about Dianna Agron, except for the fact that she looks nothing like Lois Lane. Moving on.

Biel looks like she was carved and molded out of a magical rock on Mount Olympus; her exotic looks make her almost too sexy for Lois Lane, but I really liked her performances in The Illusionist and The A-Team.

Rachel McAdams stole my heart in Wedding Crashers, stole lots more hearts than mine in The Notebook, and recently played reporters in the amazing State of Play (which I loved) and Morning Glory (which I’ll NetFlix when it hits home video).

The article also mentioned a “Winstead,” whom I’m assuming is Mary Elizabeth Winstead, and I really like her, too.

Of this particular group, I’d pick McAdams and then Biel.

But then there’s Kristen Stewart.

I’ve seen two of the Twilight movies and feel that Stewart’s character, Bella Swan, is pretty pathetic. (It’s like she only defines herself by whichever boy she’s mooning over at the moment.) And though Stewart gets a lot of grief for her performances in those films, the weak writing and stilted direction aren’t doing her — or any of her fellow actors, for that matter — any favors. She’s a much better actress than those films suggest, but I just don’t see her as having the guts or the spark to convincingly play Lois Lane.

And yet she became the center of the most attention in the ensuing days, when The New York Daily News (who also snuck Mila Kunis into the initial list) reported that Snyder had offered her the part but that she’d turned it down to focus on “smaller, independent films” in the wake of being sideswiped by the success and attention brought upon her by Twilight.

Stewart’s people hastily contacted People to assure the world that their client hadn’t been approached for the Lois Lane role at all.

So who’s telling the truth? Clint Morris from Moviehole did a little digging and said on his Twitter that one of his sources at Warner Brothers told him that “Kristen’s reps denied her Superman talks because they didn’t want it to hurt her Snow White chances.”

Those “Snow White chances,” of course, being her likely involvement in Snow White and the Huntsman alongside Charlize Theron and Viggo Mortensen for Universal. So much for wanting to do smaller movies, right?

Not that it mattered. Meanwhile, a scooper told Ain’t It Cool that Biel had been seen having lunch with Snyder, too.

But here’s where the story gets particularly interesting to me. Latino Review, who famously broke the news that Brandon Routh had been cast as Bryan Singer’s Superman in Superman Returns (review here) way back in 2005, came through with another scoop stating that Olivia Wilde had also met for the part (while confirming that Rachel McAdams was under consideration, too).

I didn’t see Tron: Legacy and I don’t watch House, so I found this video of Wilde being interviewed by Jimmy Kimmel and fell in love with her immediately. She’s hilarious. And she’s intelligent. And she’s got a lot of spark. Those are all necessary ingredients for a great Lois Lane.

And at that point, Wilde became my top choice of all the names we’d heard up to that point.

(I’d also love to see Zooey Deschanel or Alison Brie get it, and I’d have gone with Carla Gugino or Rashida Jones if an older actor like Jon Hamm had been cast as Clark, but of all the names that have been rumored this week, Wilde is my number one gal, hands down.)

But things were about to get even crazier.

Variety seemingly threw everything out the window last night when they revealed that the film’s “female lead” is down to three entirely new names — Alice Eve (She’s Out of My League), Diane Kruger (who was so amazing in Inglorious Basterds), and Rosamund Pike (Die Another Day, Surrogates, An Education) — and that the character they’re vying to portray is not Lois Lane!

That’s when What’s Playing elbowed back into the fray with a new article suggesting that the casting of Cavill — who’s British — has affected everything from where the movie will be filmed to who’s under consideration for this mysterious “female lead” who isn’t Lois Lane.

And I think that’s ridiculous, by the way. Our current Batman (Christian Bale) and Spider-Man (Andrew Garfield) actors are British, and Thor (Chris Hemsworth) and Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) are Australians, and their nationalities didn’t change anything about their movies.

I don’t know what all of this means, but you only need to look as far as the competing Hollywood spin machines in the Kristen Stewart situation to see that these things are always in motion and can change in a heartbeat.

And Variety’s bombshell doesn’t mean that Lois Lane isn’t in the movie at all. Maybe the role that Eve, Kruger, and Pike are up for is another character entirely, and that Lois will still be accounted for (and hopefully played by Olivia Wilde). It has long been rumored (with zero proof of any kind) that the film would follow a young Clark Kent as he travels the world as a journalist, so maybe the mysterious female character is another journalist he encounters along the way. There’s precedent for this, given that the screenplay was written by David S. Goyer from an idea by Goyer and Nolan, who created the character of Rachel Dawes for the Batman movies. Maybe they’re taking a page from their own book and creating a similar character for their Superman.

Maybe the mystery female role is a villain. Maybe it’s Clark Kent’s Kryptonian birth mother, Lara-El. Maybe it’s Lana Lang (though I hope not; we had enough of Lana Lang on Smallville, and I’d hate to see the new movie tread similar ground).

And maybe there’s so much secrecy surrounding the project that all of the conflicting inside sources are confused. I don’t doubt the reporting behind the stories, but maybe everything isn’t necessarily what it seems to be here.

With so many rumors flying around, Warner Bros. may announce the actress and character soon just to get us all to simmer down.

Stay tuned! The new Superman movie is scheduled to hit theaters in December 2012.

(In the meantime, what I do know for sure is that I’ll love every second that my all-time favorite Lois, Erica Durance, is on camera in tonight’s new episode of Smallville. Oh, Erica.)