Insight on DC's Scrapped ZATANNA Movie, Which Had a "Reasonably Demented" Script

J.J. Abrams was developing a DC film focused on Zatanna for a few years, but the project ended up being scrapped last year. Promising Young Woman writer and director Emerald Fennell had written the script for the film, but the studio ultimately didn’t want to move forward with it.

Fennell recently talked about the script she wrote for Zatanna, saying that it was “reasonably demented.” While a guest on the Happy Sad Confused podcast, Fennell talked her experience working on the project and how she wasn’t really familiar with the superhero genre:

“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.”

It sure did! Everything changed when James Gunn and Peter Safran took over DC Studios. Zatanna is a really cool and interesting character, though, and I wouldn’t mind seeing a film made that focuses on her.

Zatanna is a character known for her mastery of magic and her unique stage magician persona. As the daughter of the powerful magician Giovanni Zatara, she inherited a natural aptitude for the mystical arts. Zatanna's distinctive feature is her ability to cast spells by speaking words and phrases backward. She often finds herself at the center of supernatural adventures and frequently collaborates with other heroes in the DC Universe, using her magical talents to combat supernatural threats and villains. Zatanna is not only a formidable sorceress but also a skilled detective, making her a multifaceted and dynamic character within the DC mythos.