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Back in 2021, Emerald Fennell was just starting her career as a feature filmmaker and had received fairly widespread acclaim for her directorial debut, Promising Young Woman. It was no surprise, then, that the world of superheroes came knocking, and the trades soon revealed that she was writing a Zatanna movie for Bad Robot and Warner Bros.
But as the years went by, it became clear that Fennell’s DC movie wasn’t going to happen. Instead, she poured her efforts into the 2023 psychological thriller Saltburn and this year’s Margot Robbie-led bodice-ripper, Wuthering Heights. Though DC fans have often been curious about what happened to Zatanna, it was widely believed to have been shelved during the DC reset that saw James Gunn and Peter Safran take over creative control of the studio.
Now, Fennell has revealed a bit more about her stab at Zatanna and why it might not have gained traction.
“I think it was demented because I was probably going through it at the time,” Fennell told the Happy Sad Confused podcast. “And the thing is, I think what I can’t help but—and then, I’d just finished Promising Young Woman, and there was this huge thing in this world I’d never operated in. And again, it was a kind of superhero movie, and I was like, ‘How do I make the version of a superhero movie that I would connect to emotionally?’ Which is sort of the woman in the middle of a nervous breakdown, so it’s a script reflective of a woman in the middle of a nervous breakdown. And in terms of what that means, I suppose it just meant that it was probably too far away from the genre.”
Zatanna Zatara has long been one of DC’s most iconic magic-wielders. Channeling sorcery by speaking spells backward, her powers range from teleportation and elemental control to reality-warping. Serinda Swan played a more low-key version of the character on the CW’s Smallville, but Fennell’s axed movie would have marked the first time she’d have appeared on the big screen.
Fennell describes her lost Zatanna movie as “really dark” and admits she hasn’t re-read her script for a long time because she found it “really difficult.”
“I love JJ [Abrams] so much, and he took a chance offering me to do it, and I really wanted to deliver something amazing for them,” she explained. “And I always felt like I hadn’t quite maybe delivered the thing that they wanted. So, I haven’t read it since, and I wonder if I read it now, I’d be more generous toward myself. But I felt like, I wished I’d been able to deliver the thing they wanted. They were really lovely about it, it’s even just remembering. You’re making me remember scenes, I’m like, ‘Nobody would have made that.’”
Wuthering Heights is in theaters now.
The post What Went Wrong With Emerald Fennell’s DC Superhero Movie? appeared first on Den of Geek.
