News broke that Emerald Fennell (Saltburn, Promising Young Woman) had been hired to pen the script for a Zattana movie back in 2021, but with so few updates since and the more recent announcement that the current "DCEU" is being rebooted, it was generally assumed that the project had been shelved.
Now, Fennell has confirmed that the version of the movie she was involved with has indeed fallen by the wayside, although she did manage to complete her "reasonably demented" script.
“No, no, it’s not happening. I loved it [though],” Fennell told the Happy Sad Confused podcast. "This was something I was working on before [Promising Young Woman]. It was when J.J. Abrams had just arrived at Warner Bros. and was going to reboot the Dark Universe, and they were going to make this kind of dark villain universe or sort of hero/villain universe.”
“I thought he was the coolest, and his team at Robot was so cool and interesting and because I love genre of all kinds. I was definitely interested,” she continued. “I was like, ‘I don’t know a huge about the whole superhero genre; it’s not a genre I naturally gravitate towards, so I’d love to know how does one make [a superhero film] like that, for someone like me who doesn’t know so much and wouldn’t necessarily buy a ticket for that first time around. So it was that kinda thing, and Zatanna was a really, really cool character.”
Interestingly, Fennell revealed that the project was actually scrapped before James Gunn and Peter Safran came on board to revamp the franchise.
"I did write it, but it was complicated; you know, the regimes changed; it’s the classic studio stuff. J.J. is incredible, his team is incredible, and I wrote in the end a script that was reasonably demented — in a good way, I think. But in the end, the whole universe got changed. And that’s fine; It was really fun to do in the end. Whether it would have been remotely makeable… that’s the thing, I was only ever slated to write it.”
Zatanna is a character with a lot of potential, so it's a shame things didn't work out. There's a decent chance the magic-wielder will still be introduced in the DCU at some point, however.
Who would you most like to see play Zatanna? Do you have a writer/director in mind if the movie ever does enter development? Woleb nwod tnemmoc a su pord.