Emerald Fennell, the screenwriter for Saltburn and Promising Young Woman, recently confirmed that a previously announced Zatanna film project has been scrapped.
Zatanna Special (1987), DC Comics
Back in March 2021, Deadline reported Fennell was attached to pen a script for a film featuring Zatanna with J.J. Abrams’ Bad Robot company producing the film alongside Warner Bros.
In June 2021, Fennell discussed the character and script with Empire, “There are lots of things about her that felt like they could be really, really interesting. And it’ll be an opportunity to make something really quite dark. And that appealed to me, to make something big and scary. I love that stuff.”
She added, “The scale of [these movies] is so massive and so thrilling. Like, why wouldn’t you want to write something like that when you can write huge, massive, crazy sequences and fights? Normally you’re like, how can I show this in the smallest cheapest way [laughs]? To have complete freedom to really let your imagination run wild is such a joy.”
Zatanna Special (1987), DC Comics
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Now, in an interview with Josh Horowitz, Fennell confirmed the film has been scrapped.
She explained, “No, no, it’s not happening. You know what, I loved, I loved, I met… So this was all before Promising Young Woman, actually. So this was something I was working on before Promising Young Woman. It was when J.J. Abrams had just, I think, just arrived at Warner Bros. and was going to reboot the Dark Universe and they were going to take, they were going to kind of make this new kind of like dark sort of villain universe or sort of here villain universe.”
“And I just thought he was the coolest,” she said of Abrams. “His team at Bad Robot, Hannah, his producer. Bad Robot was so cool and so interesting. And because I love genre of all kinds, you know, so much of Promising Young Woman and Saltburn are prodding at a specific genre that I am definitely interested in. I’m like, ‘Oooh okay.'”
Zatanna #1 (2010), DC Comics
Fennell added, “I don’t know a huge amount about the superhero genre. It’s not a genre that I naturally gravitate towards. So I was like, ‘Okay, I’d love to know like how, how does one make a movie like that for people like me who maybe don’t know so much and wouldn’t necessarily buy a ticket the first time around. So it’s that kind of thing. I’m like, ‘Okay, this is interesting.'”
“And Zatanna is just a really, really cool character,” she continued. “But I think just like everything, I did it write it. It was complicated because I think the regime, like the things change, it’s like, you know, all the classic studio stuff.”
She then returned to gushing over Abrams, “J.J.’s incredible. His team are incredible. And I think I wrote in the end I think a script that is reasonably demented in a good way, I think. But in the end the whole universe got kind of, you know, was changed.”
Fennell then appeared to admit her script was unmakeable, “I love writing. I love writing. I love working with people so it was kind of really fun to do in the end whether or not it would have been like remotely makeable.”
Zatanna #2 (2010), DC Comics
It looks like Zatanna and DC fans dodged a bullet with Fennell’s script.
What do you make of the film getting scrapped?
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