BIRDS OF PREY Casts Its Huntress And Black Canary

Warner Bros has been testing actresses for the lead roles in its Birds of Prey movie for a while. We'd seen reports that the field of potential candidates had narrowed to a couple people per role. Now, that field has narrowed to one person per role - at least in the case of Huntress and Black Canary.

Mary Elizabeth Winstead will take the role of Huntress - a moniker that's applied to a multitude of fairly straightforward crimefighters in the DC universe over the years. One was Helena Wayne, the daughter of Batman and a parallel universe version of Catwoman; luckily, this film will feature Helena Bertinelli, the daughter of a mafia boss who vows revenge upon the criminals who killed her family. Winstead, of course, has a number of beloved roles under her belt, like in Scott Pilgrim Vs The World, Faults, 10 Cloverfield Lane, and the TV version of Fargo. Hopefully, Birds of Prey will add to that list.

Joining Winstead is Jurnee Smollett-Bell as Black Canary, another character who's been retconned and reinvented frequently, starting out as a costumed cimefighter before being endowed with martial arts skills and an immensely powerful ultrasonic scream. Smollett-Bell won accolades for her leading role in 1997 feature Eve's Bayou, going on to score series-regular roles in Friday Night Lights, Underground, the final two seasons of True Blood, and Jordan Peele's upcoming Lovecraft Country. She was also in Roll Bounce, which gives me the excuse I didn't really need to rewatch a great roller-skating movie. 

Both actors join Margot Robbie and director Cathy Yan (Dead Pigs) in producing a script by Christina Hodson (Bumblebee); they'll eventually be joined by whoever Yan and WB cast as detective Rene Montoya. The film is one of many DC Universe projects in current development, which sadly our site currently lacks the infrastructure to list here.

Birds of Prey will release on February 7, 2020.