Suicide Squad Director Feels Guilty About His Movie
Suicide Squad director David Ayer has a very specific regret about his film.
This article is more than 2 years old
Suicide Squad director David Ayer has been under scrutiny ever since the finished film came out in 2016. Fans have known that a radically different cut of the movie originally existed, but a competing cut that was being edited by a trailer editing company ended up being the preferred cut for the studio. Ayer has maintained a loyalty to that version, but a recent missive from the director has changed that in a big way.
Ayer took to Twitter to say that he has recently screened his original cut of Suicide Squad and that he felt guilty for years about this cut, believing it was a wrong move on his part and contributed to the issues surrounding the film. But it looks like Ayer has changed his tune. Check out his tweet talking about his alternate cut:
While Suicide Squad has a very negative reputation, it is not quite the abhorrent travesty that it is often painted to be. In fact, it has its merits. That being said, getting to see David Ayer’s profoundly divergent cut could open up a brand new conversation about the film. Other than Ayer’s personal feelings about the alternate cut, we would have to see if fans and casual viewers would find something substantive and higher quality about this different version of the film.
A lot of this discussion about reviving the alternate cut of Suicide Squad has been spurred on after the successful campaign to get Zack Snyder’s Justice League, an alternate version of the 2017 film. With that project on its way to HBO Max in 2021, certain fans have felt empowered to demand Ayer’s original version of Suicide Squad as well. However, there has been no confirmation from Warner Bros. that there are any plans to release this cut of the film.
Frankly, it would be far more interesting to see an alternative version of Suicide Squad than Justice League. Ayer was brought in on the ground floor of the then-nascent DC cinematic universe, and it allowed him to bring a very distinct take on the characters and world. Once critical response had backfired on Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, Warner Bros. panicked and tried to reconfigure Suicide Squad into a very different take on the material but with extremely little time and resources.
And unlike Zack Snyder’s Justice League, Ayer makes it sound like there would not be any reshoots or heavy amounts of post-production needed to complete his preferred cut of Suicide Squad. If there is the ability to release an alternate cut, it seems like a way to get more people to reevaluate this maligned movie. And though having multiple cuts of movies now seems like such a special thing, it used to be the policy of the day back when DVD sales were motivated by having “unrated” versions for consumers to feel enticed by.
Here’s hoping we will one day get to see David Ayer’s preferred version of Suicide Squad. It might also be a deeply flawed movie – it could even be worse! – but at least it will give fans the opportunity to see which version they think succeeded at its goals the best.
