Have you all heard?  In the next Batman movie, not only is Johnny Depp is going to be The Riddler, and Philip Seymour Hoffman is going to play the Penguin, but no matter what those silly Angelina Jolie rumors said, Cher is going to be playing Catwoman!!!

I mean when you think about it, it all makes PERFECT sense!

OK, really?  Why is anyone picking up these “news” stories?   (I realize I am further feeding the cycle by blogging about it, but hey, irony - what are you gonna do.)

Let’s recap some of the people who were rumored to be cast as The Joker in The Dark Knight:  Sean Penn.  Adrien Brody.  Robin Williams.  Steve Carell.   Mark Hamill, Crispin Glover, and many others also were named as possibilities before it was announced that Heath Ledger had won the part.

And that was all after we KNEW that the Joker was going to be in the movie.  So now we don’t even know who the villain will be in the next Batman movie, and yet folks are not only guessing WHICH villains it will be, but also WHO will play them.

And it’s all a complete exercise in futility, and a total waste of time.  I am hereby making several official alannoah.com predictions: Philip Seymour Hoffman will NOT play the Penguin.   Johny Depp is NOT going to play the Riddler.  Angelina Jolie will NOT play Catwoman.

But really, really, really, I do hereby predict and virtually promise that Cher will NOT play Catwoman.

For starters, the woman is over 60.  That’s not a knock at older women taking on meaty roles, but one of the points in resetting the Batman franchise at the beginning was to give Batman a younger cast.  Sure, Batman needs some wrinkled faces around, like those of Morgan Freeman and Michael Caine, but as a villain?  Can you imagine Batman beating up a Catwoman who has to go through her purse for 20 minutes looking for her keys?

And just for the record, there are plenty of other great Batman villains that weren’t in the 80’s/90’s movies that Christopher Nolan could use in the third film. Ra’s al Ghul and the Scarecrow weren’t the most well known guys in Batman’s rogues gallery, but they made great foes in Batman Begins.  It can be fun to speculate who would fit in the next movie and who could play those roles, but it should be treated as just that: pure speculation.

OMG did you hear?  It was just announced that the next Batman villains are going to be the Man-Bat played by Brad Pitt and Calendar Man played, in a bold and bizarre move, by Raven Symone!