The DCEU (the DC Extended Universe) is coming to an end this week with “Aquaman And The Lost Kingdom” (read our review). From there, it’s being rebooted as the DCU by DC Studios and its co-CEO filmmakers James Gunn and Peter Safran. From what we can all glean, about 95% of the old era—the Zack Snyder age of Gal Gadot as Wonder Woman, Ezra Miller as The Flash, and Jason Momoa as Aquaman is being scrapped, and it seems Gunn has elected to keep elements of his “The Suicide Squad” like Peacemaker (John Cena) and Amanda Waller (Viola Davis).
So, everyone seems to be on a bit of a farewell tour about it. And at least some people are being coincidentally asked about it this week. One of those people is writer/director Emerald Fennell, who was on the Happy Sad Confused podcast this week to talk about her twisted new family and privilege drama, “Saltburn” (read our review).
At one point, it was reported that Fennell was writing a “Zatanna” movie for the DCEU, a magical character who fit into what many describe as the Dark Universe corner of DC Comics. Fennell confirmed she did write a script, but as you probably assumed, that project is long dead.
“No, no, it’s not happening. I loved it [though],” she said. Interestingly enough, news of Fennell’s involvement came out after his critically acclaimed Sundance debut “Promising Young Woman” came out in 2020, and most people assumed she got the Zatanna gig based on that film. But Fennell revealed she actually worked on that project before “Promising Young Woman” made her a star writer/director.
“This was all before ‘Promising Young Woman,’ actually,” she said of the “Zatanna” gig, reminding us all that at one point, J.J. Abrams and his Bad Robot team were supposed to run the entire Dark Universe side of DC including a “Justice League Dark” movie (none of that ever happened or came to pass through and WB shelled out $500 million for a series of projects and not one came to fruition).
This was something I was working on before [that film]. It was when J.J. Abrams had just arrived at Warner Bros. and was going to reboot the [DC’s] Dark Universe, and they were going to make this kind of dark villain universe or sort of hero/villain universe.”
“I thought he was the coolest, and his team at Robot was so cool and interesting and because I love genre of all kinds… I was definitely interested,” she explained. “I was like, ‘I don’t know a huge about the whole superhero genre; it’s not a genre I naturally gravitate towards, so I’d love to know how does one make [a superhero film] like that, for someone like me who doesn’t know so much and wouldn’t necessarily buy a ticket for that first time around. So it was that kinda thing, and Zatanna was a really, really cool character.”
Of course, studio politics came into play; development at Bad Robot seemed to take forever—they also worked on a “Green Lantern” series, which was cast but then eventually scrapped—and soon, the entire thing petered out, even before James Gunn took over. Still, Fennell loved working on her script and calling it “reasonably demented,” though unsure if it would ever get made—which wasn’t really her problem as she was only hired as a writer.
“But just like everything…I did write it, but it was complicated; you know, the regimes changed; it’s the classic studio stuff. J.J. is incredible, his team is incredible, and I wrote in the end a script that was reasonably demented—in a good way, I think. But in the end, the whole universe was… you know, it got changed. And that’s fine; I love writing… it was really fun to do in the end. Whether it would have been remotely makeable… that’s the thing, I was only ever slated to write it.”
Fennell also talked about working on “Killing Eve” and confirmed that she worked on a draft of Mark Millar’s “Nemesis,” but as per usual, Millar may have overemphasized her involvement; she only did a few weeks of rewrite work (“not to say I didn’t love it, I just didn’t want to take credit for something I wasn’t instrumental in”).
It’s an engaging conversation, as usual, and you can check out the entire thing below.