David Ayer’s cut of “Suicide Squad” is officially dead at DC. After eight years of painstaking attempts to get his Director’s Cut of “Suicide Squad” re-released, Ayer has given up.
What happened? Ayer was hopeful as recently as December about his cut being released, but recent developments seem to have put a damper on his hopes — “I’m done with DC,” he tweeted out last night.
Ayer deleted a few other posts he had tweeted, insinuating that he’d been backstabbed by DC head, James Gunn. Any hope that DC would do what they did with Zack Snyder’s cut of “Justice League” quickly evaporated overnight. It seems as though Gunn personally delivered the bad news to Ayer.
Around a month ago, Ayer had tweeted that his Director’s Cut “will change the course of history.” Hilarious. Ayer had previously stated that the butchering of his original cut of ‘Suicide Squad’ was “like watching someone you love get fucked by someone you hate”.
The story goes, according to Ayer, that after ‘Batman vs Superman,’ Warner Bros feared releasing another serious and dark superhero movie, which led the studio to heavily interfere with his vision and edit the cut of “Suicide Squad” that he had, focusing on the comedy instead of its darker undertones.
Here he is further explaining the studio interference: “It’s not a matter of a new scene or two. I honestly cannot think of director cut / studio cut with more difference between them. A lot of the popular issues with “Suicide Squad” are endemic to the studio version. I made a drama not a clown show. I made a great movie.“
Should we believe Ayer when he says that his cut of “Suicide Squad” was “vastly better” than the theatrically released version? Purely based on the theatrical cut, nothing would indicate to me that a good movie is hidden somewhere inside that mess of visual debauchery. Then again, it does sound like Warner Bros heavily changed the film and that Ayer’s cut is a completely different version. I guess we’ll never know.