After five years and a couple of more titles under her belt, Emerald Fennell has enough distance from Zatanna to see where she went wrong.

The Oscar winner, who was previously tapped to write the DC superhero movie for Warner Bros. and Bad Robot back in 2021, recently explained that her version of the comic book sorceress was “probably too far away from the genre.”

“I think it was demented because I was probably going through it at the time,” she noted on the Happy Sad Confused podcast. “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.”

Fennell added, “It was really dark. I haven’t read it for a really long time, because I found it really difficult. 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.’”

In March 2021, Deadline exclusively reported that Fennell was writing the Zatanna movie, fresh off the success of her 2020 feature directorial debut A Promising Young Woman.

The character of Zatanna, who is a magician, was created by Gardner Fox and artist Murphy Anderson, making her debut in November 1964’s Hawkman. Like her father Zatara, she has many magical powers, and in that first issue, she’s on a journey to find him. Zatanna has been involved with the Justice League, has had a childhood with Batman and was romantically linked to character John Constantine. The character was played by Serinda Swan for three seasons on the CW’s Smallville.