Zatanna: Emerald Fennell’s script for scrapped DC project was “reasonably demented”

Almost three years have passed since it was announced that Promising Young Woman and Saltburn writer/director Emerald Fennell had been hired to write the screenplay for a film based on the DC Comics character Zatanna. Set up at the Max streaming service, this movie would have been a collaboration between Warner Bros.’ DC Films and J.J. Abrams’ Bad Robot Productions… and of course, due to the changes at DC Films, Zatanna has since been scrapped. But during an interview on the Happy Sad Confused podcast, Fennell revealed that she did complete the script for the project, and described it as being “reasonably demented”.

As JoBlo’s Steve Seigh previously reported, “Zatanna, created by Gardner Fox and Murphy Anderson, is known throughout the DCU as a powerful Homo Magi, meaning she’s a sub-race of naturally magic-wielding humans. As the daughter of magician Giovanni “John” Zatara and Sindella, Zatanna Zatara casts her magic by speaking spell words in a backward fashion. Per DC Fandom, she is also a direct descendant of the artist and magician Leonardo da Vinci and is related to Nostradamus, Alessandro Cagliostro, the noted alchemists Nicholas Flamel and Evan Fulcanelli, and Lord Arion of Atlantis.”

Here’s what Fennell had to say about her time writing for Zatanna (with thanks to SuperHeroHype for the transcription): “I don’t know a huge amount about the superhero genre. It’s not a genre that I naturally gravitate towards. I was like, ‘How do I 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?’ It was sort of that kind of thing and I was like, ‘Okay, this is interesting.’ Zatanna is just a really, really cool character. I think, just like everything — I did write it. It was complicated. It’s the classic studio stuff, classic studio stuff. J.J. is incredible, his team is incredible. I wrote, in the end, a script that I think is reasonably demented. In a good way, I think. In the end, I think the whole universe was changed.“

What do you think of what Fennell said about her script? Do you wish we had gotten a Zatanna movie from the maker of Promising Young Woman and Saltburn? Share your thoughts on this one by leaving a comment below.