{"id":300039,"date":"2026-02-15T23:08:06","date_gmt":"2026-02-15T23:08:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/300039\/"},"modified":"2026-02-15T23:08:06","modified_gmt":"2026-02-15T23:08:06","slug":"emerald-fennell-dishes-on-her-really-dark-zatanna-script","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/300039\/","title":{"rendered":"Emerald Fennell Dishes On Her ‘Really Dark’ Zatanna Script"},"content":{"rendered":"

Movie-wise, this weekend belongs to Emerald Fennell and her take on\u00a0Wuthering Heights. But did you know, or maybe just forget, that she was this close to writing a Zatanna solo movie<\/a>?<\/p>\n

That was all the way back in 2021, a gig she landed not long after she\u2019d delivered\u00a0Promising Young Woman. That\u2019s no longer moving forward, and as she told Josh Horowitz on the \u201cHappy Sad Confused<\/a>\u201d podcast, the script she wrote back then came about because she was \u201cprobably going through it at the time.\u201d<\/p>\n

As she tells it, Fennell had just finished up\u00a0Promising\u00a0when J.J. Abrams offered her the chance to write Zatanna. The experience was \u201c[a] huge thing in this world I never operated in.\u201d To connect emotionally with the character, she planned to make it about \u201ca woman in the middle of a nervous breakdown,\u201d which would\u2019ve come across in the script, an idea she thinks wouldn\u2019t have flown for Abrams or Warner Bros. for being \u201ctoo dark\u201d and not fitting in with the genre\u2014she vaguely teased some scenes she wrote are things no other filmmaker would\u2019ve thought up.<\/p>\n

By Fennell\u2019s own admission, she hasn\u2019t gone back and read her old script in years. While she thinks she\u2019d be kinder to it now, she still wishes she could\u2019ve given Abrams and Warner Bros. \u201cthe thing they wanted [and] deliver something amazing for them.\u201d (And when asked about doing any DC work in general, she said she\u2019s more interested in doing her own works.) Once that movie was canned, there\u2019s been no official motion on bringing Zatanna to live-action with another movie or even a show. For now, fans of the character can look forward to her new solo comic from Jamal Campbell<\/a> coming in April.<\/p>\n

[via Deadline<\/a>]<\/p>\n

Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel<\/a>, Star Wars<\/a>, and Star Trek<\/a> releases, what\u2019s next for the DC Universe on film and TV<\/a>, and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Movie-wise, this weekend belongs to Emerald Fennell and her take on\u00a0Wuthering Heights. But did you know, or maybe…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":300040,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[19307,17938,93,61,60,270,141716],"class_list":["post-300039","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-dc-comics","tag-emerald-fennell","tag-entertainment","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-movies","tag-zatanna"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/300039","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=300039"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/300039\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/300040"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=300039"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=300039"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=300039"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}