Everyone knows David Ayer is a decent filmmaker who plays well in the grittier end of the pool, with things like End Of Watch and Fury. So people were genuinely excited when the news came that he was tackling Suicide Squad, and that excitement only grew when those excellently soundtracked trailers dropped showing us something that looked different.
This is Warner Bros. and the DCEU, though. They simply couldn’t help themselves. So the studio gutted the movie in the edit, and the theatrical release was a famously anodyne, vanilla thing that just simply existed at the theater. In the process, it almost completely removed a key potential DCEU villain in the form of Jared Leto’s Joker.
Ayer has frequently voiced his frustration over what was done to his film and in the wake of the stellar success of Zack Snyder’s cut of Justice League, all the talk was over Ayer’s cut of Suicide Squad getting to see the light of day. Things stepped up when new DC Studios boss James Gunn was rumored to have told him that the film’s original version would have its time to be shared.
Ayer says the tone of his version is entirely different and has referred to it as a “fully mature edit”. He also says there are no radio music drops in his version, there are traditional character arcs, and the third act is entirely different. He has given more details in an interview with Total Film:
“I think so. I’m going to be hopeful. You know, there are a lot of people that are invested in certain narratives that don’t want it to see the light of day.
So there’s an immense political headwind against it, because if that cut were made public, the cowardliness and the whole just general shittiness of how the film’s been treated, and how the actors have had this great work that they’d done taken away…
That narrative blows up once people see the movie. But it’s coming. Something’s going to happen. Something’s going to be revealed. The truth always comes out. It always comes out.”
The cut has been seen by some at the studio and people close to the director. Word on the street is that these people are genuinely shocked by how much better this version of the movie is.
Well done Warner Bros. Yet another win from the brains trust.
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