I don't know what it is with these rumours about The Dark Knight sequel, which we'll call Batman 3 for now, but it seems to be going crazy with "who could be the next villain?" and "which big name star could play them?", and the next one is out and it's rather fantastical too.

I'm surprised that this is happening so much considering that we don't actually have the Nolan brothers on board to write, nor is it a certainty that Christopher Nolan will direct.

Right now in fact there's little that is concrete, we don't even know if there will be another Batman film after The Dark Knight (Filmstalker review). Actually I'm pretty sure there will be, the real question is if there's going to be one coming from the talented Nolan brothers.

So we've heard that Angelina Jolie would love to play Catwoman - you have to watch those off hand comments in Hollywood - and now we're hearing that the producers of the film would love Johnny Depp to play the Riddler and Philip Seymour Hoffman as the Penguin.

While these sound like more and more rumours plucked from idle Friday afternoon banter about which star could play which villain, it is starting to raise a few concerns for me about the production. After all, this is what went wrong with Spider-Man.

In step the producers saying that they want more villains and that they want this and that, and it's up to the writers and director to try and fit them in and make the film work regardless of what they want.

That's something very dangerous when we've just seen the best Batman film, the best comic book character film, and a damn good film at that, all coming from the great writer, director, cinematographer, editor, musical director, and so on. Not a producer in sight.

For the producers to start saying what and who they want in the film before there is any actual film creating talent on board is rather dangerous, aren't we going down the route of the old Batman films all of a sudden?

I think they need to back off and court the Nolan's, try and get them back for another film before shouting about who can play roles in the film and what characters they could play.

Anyway, I think these two latest names are just idle speculation and not from anyone really involved in the film, especially not the creative side. The comments come from one of those pesky sources through The Telegraph and Comic Book Movie.

While the speculation over at the Telegraph, obviously from someone who doesn't know about films, is that the next film could feature Riddler, Penguin and Catwoman, I very much doubt it. At the most we'll have two villains in the film, Nolan showed us that could work, but only if they could work together on screen.

We've seen how many comic book films, especially Batman, have been ruined with too many villains, why don't the producers (if that's who the source was) just wait until they have creatives onboard and get them to come up with the ideas? You know, the ones that made The Dark Knight such a success?