Emerald Fennell has admitted her "demented" Zatanaa movie was "too dark" to get made.

The Wuthering Heights filmmaker signed up in 2021 to write a script for a planned superhero movie for Warner Bros. and Bad Robot, but her take on the titular character - a magician and considered one of the most powerful sorcerers in the DC universe - was "too far away from the genre" because of what she was going through herself at the time.

She reflected on the Happy Sad Confused podcast: "I think it was demented because I was probably going through it at the time.

"And the thing is, I think what I can't help but--and then, I'd just finished A Promising Young Woman, and there was this huge thing in this world I'd never operated in.

"And again, it was a kind of superhero movie, and I was like, '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, so it's a script reflective of a woman in the middle of a nervous breakdown. And in terms of what that means, I suppose it just meant that it was probably too far away from the genre.

"It was really dark. I haven't read it for a really long time, because I found it really difficult."

Emerald hasn't looked back on her script since it was first written because she was disappointed that she didn't feel she had given producers what they were looking for.

She added: "Because, also the thing is, I love JJ [Abrams] so much, and he took a chance 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 the thing that they wanted.

" So, I haven't read it since, and I wonder if I read it now, I'd be more generous toward myself. But I felt like, I wished I'd been able to deliver the thing they wanted. They were really lovely about it, it's even just remembering.

"You're making me remember scenes, I'm like, 'Nobody would have made that.'"

Zatanna is best known in the franchise for her involvement with the Justice League, which includes heroes such as Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, and Aquaman and was previously played by Serinda Swan in the later seasons of the CW series Smallville, but the movie would have been the character's first appearance in a DCEU movie.