Several years ago, Warner Bros. actively pursued the idea of a Justice League Dark universe.This was long before James Gunn and Peter Safran took over as the heads of DC Studios. The Snyderverse was still going and the franchise wasn’t totally cohesive. As part of that, a Zatanna movie was in development at one point around 2018.
Emerald Fennell (Promising Young Woman) was tasked with writing the script. J.J. Abrams was on board as a producer. It never came to pass but now, Fennell is sharing details on what her movie might have looked like. While promoting her new movie Wuthering Heights, she appeared on the Happy Sad Confused podcast. Naturally, her Zatanna movie came up. Here’s what she had to say about it.
“I think it was demented because I was probably going through it at the time. I just finished Promising Young Woman, and there was this huge thing in this world that I’d never operated in. I was like, ‘Okay, how do I make the version of a superhero movie that I would connect to emotionally?’ [I was a] woman in the middle of a nervous breakdown.”
“It’s a script reflective of a woman in the middle of a nervous breakdown, I would say,” she added. “I suppose it just meant that it was probably too far away from the genre. It was really dark. I haven’t read it for a really long time because I found it really difficult.”
Zatanna is one of the best known magicians in mainstream comics. She first appeared in Hawkman #4 in 1964, created by Gardner Fox and Murphy Anderson. More recent DC Comics readers will know her best as a member of the Justice League Dark team, which first debuted in 2011 as part of the New 52 publishing line.
Guillermo del Toro was at one point going to make a Justice League Dark movie, which would have featured Zatanna. Again, that never came to pass either. Speaking further, Fennell explained that she was a big fan of Abrams and was happy he’d asked her to take a stab at the project. That said, she never felt like she managed to deliver what the studio wanted from it.
“I love JJ so much, and he took a chance on offering me to do it, and I really wanted to deliver something amazing for them, and I always felt like I hadn’t quite delivered the thing that they wanted.”
HBO Max was pursuing Zatanna and Constantine shows instead in 2020, but those fell apart too. Who knows? Now that Gunn and Safran are in the midst of rebooting the DC Universe, maybe this movie can make a comeback. Warner Bros. made Wuthering Heights and it’s on track to be a big hit. Stranger things have happened.
Wuthering Heights is in theaters now.
What do you think? Would you have liked to see the Zatanna movie? Do you think it will happen someday? Join in on the conversation over on Facebook or Twitter!
