Suicide Squad faced problems from the very start. The first look at Jared Leto's Joker was met with an overwhelmingly negative response, while someone from inside Hall H later leaked the trailer and forced Warner Bros. to release it weeks, or possibly months, before they originally planned to.
After the negative response to the Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice's grim tone, the studio panicked and made sweeping changes to David Ayer's 2016 movie. Commissioning multiple cuts of the movie, we eventually ended up with a stylish, albeit underwhelming effort that the filmmaker has claimed was nothing like what he originally had planned for his DC Comics adaptation.
Now, Ayer has issued a lengthy statement about his "Ayer Cut" of Suicide Squad.
"I put my life into Suicide Squad," he says. "I made something amazing. My cut is intricate and emotional journey with some bad people who are shit on and discarded (a theme that resonates in my soul). The studio cut is not my movie. Read that again. And my cut is not the 10 week director’s cut – it’s a fully mature edit by Lee Smith standing on the incredible work by John Gilroy."
"It’s all Steven Price’s brilliant score, with not a single radio song in the whole thing," he adds, confirming that the Grammy-nominated soundtrack was not his doing. "It has traditional character arcs, amazing performances, a solid third-act resolution. A handful of people have seen it."
"I never told my side of the story and never will. I’m old school like that. So I kept my mouth shut and took the tsunami of sometimes shocking personal criticism." Ayer concluded by praising James Gunn's work on The Suicide Squad and added that "I will no longer speak publicly on the matter." As a result, it now seems clear that his version will never see the light of day.
Check out Ayer's full statement, and Gunn's response, below:
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