{"id":469320,"date":"2026-02-15T02:37:08","date_gmt":"2026-02-15T02:37:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/469320\/"},"modified":"2026-02-15T02:37:08","modified_gmt":"2026-02-15T02:37:08","slug":"even-emerald-fennell-thinks-her-zatanna-script-was-too-weird-to-be-a-superhero-movie","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/469320\/","title":{"rendered":"Even Emerald Fennell thinks her Zatanna script was too weird to be a superhero movie"},"content":{"rendered":"

The early 2020s were a heady time for the world of comic book adaptations. Still coasting off the highs of\u00a0Avengers: Endgame\u2014and maybe hankering for a little more of that sweet critical aplomb\u2014producers 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 Chlo\u00e9 Zhao going from her Oscar-winning Nomadland<\/a>\u00a0to her very-much-not-that Eternals<\/a>, 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<\/a>, to write a movie based on DC Comics\u2019 resident magic lady Zatanna was a pretty wild swing.<\/p>\n

And that\u2019s not just us saying it: Fennell herself has now admitted that the script she presented to Warner Bros. for a\u00a0Zatanna 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\u00a0Wuthering Heights<\/a>, which is expected to slightly underperform at the Valentine\u2019s Day box office this weekend\u2014possibly, in part, because it\u2019s not weird\u00a0enough. But in a recent conversation with Happy Sad Confused<\/a>, Fennell laid out what was going on with her\u00a0Zatanna\u00a0script, which she was reported to be working on back in 2021<\/a> (via Deadline<\/a>):<\/p>\n

I think it was demented because I was probably going through it at the time. And the thing is, I think what I can\u2019t help but\u2014and then, I\u2019d just finished\u00a0A Promising Young Woman, and there was this huge thing in this world I\u2019d never operated in. And again, it was a kind of superhero movie, and I was like, \u201cHow do I make the version of a superhero movie that I would connect to emotionally?\u201d Which is sort of the woman in the middle of a nervous breakdown, so it\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

Fennell went on to add that the script was \u201creally dark,\u201d and that she hasn\u2019t read it in several years, at least in part over bad feelings that she\u2019d let down Abrams and the film\u2019s prospective producers. \u201cThey were really lovely about it, it\u2019s even just remembering,\u201d she told\u00a0Happy Sad Confused\u2018s Josh Horowitz. \u201cYou\u2019re making me remember scenes, I\u2019m like, \u2018Nobody would have made that.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Created in 1964 by Gardner Fox and Murphy Anderson, Zatanna has always existed at a weird point between DC\u2019s goofier and more philosophical impulses. (Which is to say, she\u2019s 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\u2019s popped up periodically in TV adaptations of the comic book universe, every attempt to bring the character into films\u2014including both Fennell\u2019s abortive efforts and Guillermo Del Toro\u2019s proposed \u201cJustice League Dark\u201d project\u2014has ultimately failed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The early 2020s were a heady time for the world of comic book adaptations. Still coasting off the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":469321,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[52],"tags":[88,206],"class_list":["post-469320","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-entertainment","tag-movies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/469320","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=469320"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/469320\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/469321"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=469320"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=469320"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=469320"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}