Is The Zatanna Movie Canceled? Writer Provides Update Amid James Gunn's DCU Reboot

There have been a whole lot of shake-ups to the DC slate since James Gunn and Peter Safran took over the DCU, effectively putting an end to Zack Snyder's DCEU in the process. While many projects have been shelved or canceled since the changeover began, others have been left in limbo, with fans wondering if they'll ever come to fruition at all.

This was thought to be the case with Emerald Fennell's "Zatanna" movie until very recently. The filmmaker appeared on the "Happy Sad Confused" podcast, where the prospective film was among the topics discussed. Unfortunately for fans of DC's magical maven, however, it looks like this iteration of the character is effectively dead.

"No, no, it's not happening. I loved it [though]," Fennell said. "This was something I was working on before ['Promising Young Woman']. It was when J.J. Abrams had just arrived at Warner Bros. and was going to reboot the Dark Universe, and they were going to make this kind of dark villain universe or sort of hero/villain universe," she explained.

DC fans will likely recall the plan that the "Saltburn" and "Promising Young Woman" director is referring to. For years, there have been rumblings that we might see a "Justice League Dark" film or television series. Like DC's central Justice League, the occult/supernatural-based team features multiple characters, like Zatanna and John Constantine, working together.

"I was definitely interested," Emerald Fennell explained on "Happy Sad Confused." "I was like, 'I don't know a huge [amount] 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," she said, pointing out that she was largely an outsider to the world of comic books.

For fans who are unaware, Zatanna is a long-running character in DC Comics. She has innate magical and cosmic abilities that allow her to teleport, heal herself and others, and employ a whole host of other powers. She invokes these abilities by speaking backward to hone her concentration, a strategy that she learned from her father.

"I did write it, but it was complicated; you know, the regimes changed; it's the classic studio stuff," Fennell explained. "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 got changed. And that's fine; It was really fun to do in the end," she concluded.