Emerald Fennell has joined the long list of filmmakers once attached to a DC project that will never see the light of day.
We initially reported back in 2021 that the Saltburn writer/director was set to pen a Zantanna movie that would’ve fallen under the Dark Universe banner for DC. As we know, James Gunn and Peter Safran wiped the slate clean with the new DC Studios, and Fennell is no longer set to write the movie.
Speaking to MTV’s Josh Horowitz, the filmmaker remembered her brief time working on the project with DC.
Fennell recalls, “No. No, it’s not happening. It was, you know what, I loved… So this was all before Promising Young Woman, actually. So, this was something I was working on before Promising Young Woman, and it was when J.J. Abrams had just arrived at Warner Brothers and was going to reboot the Dark Universe, and they were going to kind of make this new kind of dark, sort of villain universe, or hero/villain 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.”
She notes why this spoke to her, even without previous comic book movie history. “And because I love genres of all kinds…so much of Promising Young Woman and Saltburn are prodding at a specific genre that I’m definitely interested in, like, ‘Oh 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… 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.’ So it’s sort of that kind of thing. I’m like, ‘Okay, this is interesting.’ And Zatanna is just a really, really cool character.”
Fennell notes that she still had fun with what she got to work on, adding: “I wrote, in the end, I think, a script that is reasonably demented… in a good way, I think. But in the end, I think the whole universe… was changed. But that’s fine. I love writing. I love writing. I love working with people, so it was kind of really fun to do in the end, whether or not it would been like remotely makeable.”
SEE ALSO: Read our exclusive interview with Emerald Fennell on Saltburn here
Her latest film, Saltburn, is making a splash and even secured a Best Picture nomination at the Critics Choice Awards. Check out our video review of the film below…
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Saltburn is now streaming on Prime Video.
