The early 2020s were a heady time for the world of comic book adaptations. Still coasting off the highs of Avengers: Endgame—and maybe hankering for a little more of that sweet critical aplomb—producers of superhero fare made a habit of tapping ever-more distinctive artists to try to fit within the Marvel or DC mold, leading to somewhat awkward fits like Chloé Zhao going from her Oscar-winning Nomadland to her very-much-not-that Eternals, or Sam Raimi trying to fit his sensibilities into the house style for a Doctor Strange movie. Even on that score, though, tapping Emerald Fennell, fresh off provocative rape revenge thriller Promising Young Woman, to write a movie based on DC Comics’ resident magic lady Zatanna was a pretty wild swing.
And that’s not just us saying it: Fennell herself has now admitted that the script she presented to Warner Bros. for a Zatanna movie, after her pal J.J. Abrams vouched for her to get the job, was a weird one. Fennell was asked about this while promoting her current Wuthering Heights, which is expected to slightly underperform at the Valentine’s Day box office this weekend—possibly, in part, because it’s not weird enough. But in a recent conversation with Happy Sad Confused, Fennell laid out what was going on with her Zatanna script, which she was reported to be working on back in 2021 (via Deadline):
I think it was demented because I was probably going through it at the time. And the thing is, I think what I can’t help but—and then, I’d just finished A 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.
Fennell went on to add that the script was “really dark,” and that she hasn’t read it in several years, at least in part over bad feelings that she’d let down Abrams and the film’s prospective producers. “They were really lovely about it, it’s even just remembering,” she told Happy Sad Confused‘s Josh Horowitz. “You’re making me remember scenes, I’m like, ‘Nobody would have made that.’”
Created in 1964 by Gardner Fox and Murphy Anderson, Zatanna has always existed at a weird point between DC’s goofier and more philosophical impulses. (Which is to say, she’s a character who dresses like a cheesecake version of a classic stage magician, while having a functionally infinite power set that lets her make anything happen as long as she can say it backwards.) Although she’s popped up periodically in TV adaptations of the comic book universe, every attempt to bring the character into films—including both Fennell’s abortive efforts and Guillermo Del Toro’s proposed “Justice League Dark” project—has ultimately failed.
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