Who will be the villain in The Batman*, to be directed by Ben Affleck? A lot of people are speculating that it'll be a version of Under the Red Hood, in which dead Robin Jason Todd returns from the grave as a vengeful villain. I'm hearing that is not the case (and it's smart to avoid - it would look too much like DC is doing their own Winter Soldier at this point). To be fair, I don't know who the actual villain of the movie will be, but my sources have told me this:

Many, if not most, members of Batman's rogue's gallery will be making appearances in the film. It's going to be crammed with Bat villains, which means that just about every major bad guy you've ever wanted to see in a movie will be in this movie. According to my sources Affleck and Geoff Johns, who has been working with him on the film, want to make the definitive Batman film. They want to tell the ultimate Batman story, and to do so they're going to bring in all the big guns. They're going to have a big, sprawling Bat universe already in place.

My guess is that most of these will be cameos, possibly characters appearing in Arkham Asylum (could they be doing a weird adaptation of Arkham Asylum? That's just a total piece of speculation). But that still means we're gonna have a lot of villains showing up, which means a lot of interesting casting, and a lot of interesting possibilities for future films. This certainly fits in with the larger DC movieverse model, which is to introduce everything already developed in one fell swoop as opposed to building it up. When it comes to Batman I'm actually very okay with this - everybody in the world knows who The Penguin and The Riddler are, and we don't need to watch their first meeting with Batman yet again.

Which Bat villains do you hope make the cut for The Batman? If these are just cameos the possibilities for truly interesting casting are endless - which Bat baddie would Matt Damon play?

* not the official title, but it's good, and if we all use it enough maybe WB will use it too.