True, there isn’t a script for Batman 3 yet, Christopher Nolan hasn’t even admitted that he wants to make a Batman 3 three yet and for all we know the movie’s going to be about Crazy Quilt or Mr Polka Dot instead of The Penguin. But, that said, Phillip Seymour Hoffman is definitely going to play The Penguin in Batman 3.

Except Phillip Seymour Hoffman doesn’t really think that’s going to happen. In a recent interview Hoffman claimed that he doesn’t think he’d be a good Penguin and that someone else should probably do it instead. Which, we think, is a coded message to say that he thinks he’d be a brilliant Penguin in Batman 3 and that he definitely wants to do it. Tell your friends. It’s official!

Even though The Dark Knight is second only to Titanic in terms of box office grosses, you wouldn’t want to be invited to play a Batman villain in its sequel, would you. Just look what the horrific curse of Batman has done to the acting community already.

Heath Ledger, obviously, played The Joker in The Dark Knight and wound up dead, but that’s not all. Cesar Romero played The Joker in the 1960s Batman TV series and he died just 24 years afterwards at the tragically young age of 86. Worse still, Jack Nicholson played The Joker in the 1989 Tim Burton Batman movie and he’s ended up being quite old.

Phillip Seymour Hoffman knows this only too well, and the last thing he wants to do is be dead or old one day, which is why he’s doing his best to distance himself from rumours linking him to the role of The Penguin in Batman 3.

Ever since The Dark Knight was released, there have been three main rumours about Batman 3 – 1) Johnny Depp would be the Riddler, 2) Cher would be Catwoman and 3) Phillip Seymour Hoffman would be The Penguin.

Given that nobody – not even, it seems, Christopher Nolan – knows what’s going to even happen in Batman 3 yet, these rumours have seemed unlikely at best or, in Cher’s case, freakish and somewhat libido-dulling. And, just to make that perfectly clear, Phillip Seymour Hoffman has finally weighed in on the possibility of playing The Penguin, as Digital Spy reports:

“To be quite honest, I don’t know whether I would be a good Penguin. I think I’m more interested in seeing someone else do it.”

Now, Hollywood is a funny place, so we’re taking Phillip Seymour Hoffman’s statement as meaning one of three things:

1 - Phillip Seymour Hoffman knows that he’s a favourite for The Penguin in Batman 3 and he’s distancing himself deliberately so that producers ramp up their fee to lure him in.

2 - Phillip Seymour Hoffman genuinely doesn’t want to be The Penguin because he’d much rather make thematically-impenetrable Charlie Kaufman movies for the rest of his life.

3 - Phillip Seymour Hoffman is definitely definitely going to play The Penguin in Batman 3. Definitely.

Oh, who are we kidding? It’s the last one, isn’t it.

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In fact, people are going so potty over The Dark Knight that they’ve started to pretend that they’ve already seen it just so they can move onto speculation over Batman 3. So we may as well do the same. It’s not like we’ve got anything better to do.

Batman screenwriters David Goyer and Jonah Nolan have responded to claims that the baddies in Batman 3 will be Catwoman and The Penguin by saying that the baddies in Batman 3 definitely won’t be Catwoman and The Penguin. They’ve got a whole raft of other villains to chose from, so why pick the two most obvious? Especially when nobody’s put Lola Lasagne in a Batman movie yet.

Believe what you read and you’ll hear that The Dark Knight is as good as The Godfather II, that The Dark Knight is so profound that your life will be changed forever by two and a half hours of watching a man in a silly rubber costume riding a bike, and that Heath Ledger’s performance as The Joker is so perfect that all Oscars past present and future should be posthumously given to Heath, melted down and made into a single giant Oscar that does the dance from 10 Things I Hate About You every hour on the hour.

Is The Dark Knight that good? Buggered if we know, but we’ve been suckered in by the hype as much as anyone else. So, to try and combat our feelings of market-manipulated vulnerability, let’s try and take control by starting up a bunch of hype about Batman 3.

Christian Bale is already keen to make another Batman movie and, so long as Christopher Nolan decides that he wants to, it’s pretty much a done deal already. Which begs the question – which of Batman’s villains will feature in Batman 3?

Obviously the two main choices are The Penguin and Catwoman. They’re just as iconic as The Joker and they’ve as yet been ignored by the Nolan Batman series. However, we have our reservations.

For example, The Penguin is usually seen as a comedy character, and Christopher Nolan would rather cut his balls off than have a moment of light relief in one of his Batman films. And as for Catwoman… given what Nolan has done to The Joker, we’re not sure that we’re ready to have our life-long Catwoman fetish ruined by a scar-covered mess with matted hair and a freaky make-up job.

Luckily, Batman writers David Goyer and Jonah Nolan agree with us, although their reasoning has slightly less to do with the preservation of a slightly unnatural sexual fantasy than ours. Totalfilm reports:

“In the first movie we use Ra’s Al Ghul and The Scarecrow, who had not been in the movies before, and had not been in the sixties TV show before. And there are dozens if not hundreds of other characters that fit that bill. Everyone says its gotta be The Penguin or Catwoman… well I completely disagree.”

Of course, there are hundreds of various Batman villains that could be used in Batman 3, so we’ll just have to sit and wait to see which ones get used.

Needless to say, we’ll never be happy until Schwarzenegger reprises his role as Mr Freeze, because if there’s one thing that Christopher Nolan is shit at, it’s the ice-based pun.

What would you rather have – a critically-acclaimed immersive crime drama or a great big European guy painted blue shouting things like “You’re not sending me to the cooler!”? Mr Freeze wins every time. It’s not even a contest.