Warner Bros. and Cathy Yan’s female-fronted Birds of Prey movie is finally beginning to take shape.
According to Deadline, Mary Elizabeth Winstead and Jurnee Smollett-Bell have been cast as Huntress and Black Canary, respectively, beating out a whole host of prominent female stars in the process. They’ll be joining Margot Robbie’s Harley Quinn (but not Batgirl) in the upcoming feature, who’s also producing Birds of Prey by way of her Luckychap production banner.
Like we mentioned before, Cathy Yan is calling the shots from behind the lens and will, presumably, place DC’s Birds of Prey on a collision course with the infamous Black Mask. He’s one of Gotham’s most formidable bad guys, and a constant thorn in Bruce Wayne’s side, so we’re intrigued to see how Yan and her writing team – namely Bumblebee‘s Christina Hodson – whip things into shape.
But in this particular rendition of Gotham, Batman’s nowhere to be found, leaving the Birds of Prey to wrangle with the city’s notorious crime rate. Mary Elizabeth Winstead and Jurnee Smollett-Bell no doubt make exciting additions to the cast, and now all that’s left is for the DC to locate its Black Mask.
Per Deadline:
Black Canary is known for her shrieking cry. Huntress has taken different forms in the DC Universe, though in the WB series Birds of Prey, she was the daughter of Batman, who disappeared after the death of her mother, Catwoman. The Huntress in this series worked with Oracle and Black Canary’s daughter as the primary crimefighters in Gotham City.
The Birds of Prey spinoff has been penciled in for a release on February 7th, 2020. It’ll likely be joined in that same corridor by The Batman and Suicide Squad 2, though the latter has been conspicuously quiet of late, which is really something that can be said about a lot of DC projects percolating in development.
From what we understand, Warner is taking it one comic book movie at a time, so don’t expect to hear much more about dormant projects like Nightwing for quite a while.
