Hollywood is littered with stories of the greatest movies never made. For every big film project that makes it to the screen, there is a script or an idea for a script that never makes it that far. We’ll only ever wonder how those movies might have been, but now I will forever be in search of the alternate universe where Emerald Fennell’s Zatanna movie was made because I need to see it.
Back in 2019, WB closed a deal with J.J. Abrams’ Bad Robot production company to produce DC content that would have included material from the “Dark” part of the DC universe. This would have included a film based on Justice League Dark member Zatanna. Emerald Fennell was brought in to pen the script, which it turns out she did, but she recently explained on the Happy Sad Confused podcast that the movie is dead, saying…
No, it’s not happening. You know what I loved…I met, this was all before Promising Young Woman actually. This was something I was working on before Promising Young Woman. It was when J.J. Abrams I think had just arrived at Warner Bros. and was going to reboot the Dark Universe, and they were going to make this new kind of like villain-hero universe. And I just thought he was the coolest. His team at Bad Robot, Hannah his producer at Bad Robot was so cool and so interesting.
There was no mention of Justice League Dark or any of the associated content when James Gunn set out the first chapter of the new DCU, Gods and Monsters. While the new universe leaves room for Elseworlds content that is not in continuity with the main universe, it sounds like none of that is currently in the cards.
Emerald Fennell admits that she’s not a major superhero fan, but it sounds like she really enjoyed making a movie in the genre that would potentially appeal to others who were not. She continued…
Because I love genre, of all kinds. So much of Promising Young Woman and Saltburn are prodding at a specific genre that I’m definitely interested in like okay, I don’t know a huge amount about the superhero genre. It’s not a genre that I naturally gravitate towards, so I was like okay well, I’d love to know like how does one 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.
She calls her script “reasonably demented” which is exactly the sort of superhero movie you would expect from the woman who wrote Promising Young Woman and Saltburn and exactly the sort of movie the genre needs. And who knows? The project may be dead now, but that doesn’t mean it might not find new life one day down the road.