We're opening any Batman 3 casting story at the moment with a caveat that there's a lot of rumours going round, and many of them are bound not to be true.

Currently, the state of play with The Dark Knight follow-up is that Christopher Nolan still hasn't, to our knowledge, been confirmed as director, but he's actively working on the project, and is pretty certain to be helming. It's also looking very likely that The Riddler is to be making an appearance and, were we bookmakers, we'd have stopped taking bets on Joseph Gordon-Levitt being offered the role.

The rumours have also persisted, however, that Catwoman/Selina Kyle will be introduced in this movie. And the latest story doing the rounds is directly related to said rumour. For it's being suggested that Marion Cotillard, fresh off the back of Christopher Nolan's Inception, has been approached about appearing in the film.

The story originally surfaced at the ComicBookMovie.com site, although it appears to have disappeared in the last few hours. It had cited a source - who was claimed to be a former intern at Warner Bros - as saying that Cotillard had been approached about playing either Talia al Ghul or Selina Kyle in the next Batman movie.

The original report read, "They went on to tell me that Cotillard has had to turn down the offer as of now as she's unsure whether the planned shooting start date of the next Batman movie will clash with other projects she's either interested in or already committed to, despite the fact that she's reportedly keen to re-team team with Christopher Nolan."

It does all sound like a liberal dose of salt would be useful when digesting all of this, and our standard suggestion of treating all of this as fun until something more substantive comes along remains firmly in place.

Here's a fuller account of what ComicBookMovie said, over at Batman Movie News...