There’s a hefty amount of heroes and villains lined up to continue James Gunn’s vision of the DC Universe, but one hero that it would take an extra bit of magic to include would be Zatanna. The spell-casting hero might not be as well known as Wonder Woman or Batman, but she’s certainly held her own in the comics, earning a place in both the Justice League as well as a supernatural branch of supers, Justice League Dark. A few years back, when the DCEU was struggling to find its footing before being wiped clean, Warner Bros. approached Emerald Fennell — the director of the half-remembered dream but fully divisive recent romance Wuthering Heights — to make a film, which unfortunately never came to pass.
During an appearance on the Happy Sad Confused podcast, Fennell spoke about her brief brush with the comic book world. “I just finished Promising Young Woman, and there was this huge thing in this world that I’d never operated in,” the director recalled. “It was a kind of superhero movie, and I was like, ‘Okay, how do I make the version of a superhero movie that I would connect to emotionally,’ which is sort of the woman in the middle of a nervous breakdown.”
The project was set to be part of the DCEU’s supernatural sector of the universe, which, at the time, had been handed to J.J. Abrams. Fennell’s contribution to the now-defunct blueprint, unfortunately, just wasn’t clicking with what was being planned. When Fennell was asked about what her take on the Mistress of Magic involved, she described it as “a script reflective of a woman in the middle of a nervous breakdown, I would say. And in terms of what that means, well, I suppose it just meant that it was probably too far away, maybe a little too far away from the genre.”
“I haven’t read it for a really long time because I found it really difficult, because also the thing is, I love J.J., and he took a chance on offering me to do it, and I really wanted to deliver something amazing for them, and I always felt like I hadn’t quite maybe delivered on the thing that they wanted,” Fennell confessed. “You’re making me remember scenes, I’m like, ‘oh, nobody would’ve made that. Nobody would’ve made it.’”
As it stands, there don’t look to be any plans for a new take on Zatanna to magic herself into James Gunn’s take on the DC universe. For now, we can only wonder what could’ve been and hope that someone has the magic to give Zatanna the attention she deserves.