Sometimes, a movie character is cast so perfectly that you can’t even fathom another actor playing the role. Cue Christian Bale in American Psycho, a career-launching breakout performance as Patrick Bateman, the greedy, materialistic Wall Street yuppie who moonlights as a murderous, stark-raving mad psycho killer while trying to preserve his public mask of sanity. Whether it’s all in his mind, Bale plays Bateman with such outward surety and inward insecurity, such brooding intensity and mordant comedy at once, that he keeps viewers guessing about Bateman’s sick, twisted, hyperviolent fantasies.

To think that director Mary Harron had to fight tooth and nail to cast Bateman in the role is preposterous to consider now, 25 years after the film was released. But again, even if Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt played Patrick Bateman, both of whom were attached to the role at one point, neither would likely strike the...