Why We Need the Ayer Cut of Suicide Squad

“What happened to David Ayer with Suicide Squad is arguably worse than what happened to Zack Snyder with Justice League.”

When you read that sentence for the first time, it might make your brain hurt, especially if you’ve been active in the Release The Snyder Cut movement for the past two and a half years, and if you know as much about the details of what happened as anyone involved with it does. They made the man compromise his vision, still didn’t like it, and then used a family tragedy that caused him to step away from the project to completely reshoot and recut his film in what we are now learning was likely a far more toxic and hostile environment than we could have originally surmised. 

How the hell could you possibly do something worse than that? 

I present to you David Ayer, the director of the movie that was set to release less than five months after Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. 

Let’s get one thing straight here before going forward: There is no argument being made that what happened to Zack Snyder wasn’t heinous and grossly unethical at best. The studio actively worked to take away and destroy the creative freedom of a director that they had originally trusted with his vision on how to bring the DC Extended Universe to life on the big screen, all while he was dealing with a horrific personal situation. There was no surprise that the end result of Justice League led to a lot of people getting fired, because they had all spent a year committing fireable offenses in the first place. It was an awful situation that is now finally being made whole with HBO Max releasing Zack Snyder’s Justice League in 2021. 

Here’s the crazy thing about all of it, though. As horrible as that situation was, the decisions made by WB with respect to Justice League were directly in response to the previous film that Zack Snyder had made in BvS, which they also badly affected with awful edits that neutered a great deal of the movie in order to get the runtime down for more screens. So without letting them off the hook for doing it, we can still say that at least their decisions on Justice League affected a director based on his own previous work. It was still BS and absolutely unprofessional in execution, but it was because of his own previous work. 

That is not the case with David Ayer, who was told to significantly alter his nearly finished film shortly after BvS released in theaters. His vision and intent for Suicide Squad was filmed without any meddling incidents, and a cut was completed to his creative specifications, only needing some actual fine tuning for VFX and final release on August 5, 2016. 

Then just as he’s nearing the finish line, mere feet away from the white tape if you will, he’s told to change his movie and do reshoots to lighten the tone…...because of another director’s film that is being critically panned. 

It’s one thing if you make a movie that gets critically panned and the studio makes you change things for the next movie you intend to make. It’s another thing entirely when a studio makes you change your movie because they didn’t like what someone else did with their movie. That’s guilt by association on the thinnest level you could possibly find. 

Imagine you and other people are writing short stories for a book. You’ve finished yours and it just needs a few grammatical fixes here and there. It’s your story, you wrote it the way you wanted to, you’re happy and proud of it and you’re going to get to publish it on Page 3 of the book just like they originally told you that you would. 

Then out of nowhere, the bookmakers tell you to change your story and make it happier because the guy that wrote his short story for Page 2 is getting slammed, and they need Page 3 to be different now because of it. Oh, and you only have a day or so to change it because you’re going to print very soon, and a couple of other people that don’t know how to edit stories but have made a living editing short sentences, are going to help you in changing it. 

That last part refers to Trailer Park, the company that made the teaser for Suicide Squad that was later brought into change the movie from Ayer’s original vision. 

Here’s the kicker about your Page 3 story: You have to make all these changes, allow these others who don’t know a thing about writing short stories help you change them, and not only do you have to stay quiet about it, you have to trumpet what they do as something you were in favor of the whole time. So when Page 3 is printed in that book and is seen by all the readers, you have to tell them it was exactly how you intended it to be, even though it’s not at all. 

This is what David Ayer had to do for Suicide Squad and why it is arguably a worse situation, because he had nothing to do with the original reason his movie got changed in the first place. For the past four years he’s watched that version of his film get torn apart by critics, bloggers and idiot fans on social media, knowing full well that his original vision sits somewhere, ready to be finalized and shown to the world as what he truly intended it to be. 

So, the fact that Ayer has become incredibly vocal about his cut of Suicide Squad in the past few months, squarely in the wake of the announcement of Zack Snyder’s Justice League, should be no surprise to anyone that has been paying attention. Snyder wasn’t the only director horribly wronged by the previous WB regime. Ayer was as well, and like Snyder, he would like an opportunity for the fanbase and the audience at large to see the vision of his film as he originally intended it to be, without the pop soundtrack, without the poor editing choices, and ultimately without the studio meddling that created the film we received on August 5, 2016. 

I need to see this version post haste for myself, because while I liked Suicide Squad for what it was in theaters, the idea of creative freedom being infringed upon once again doesn’t sit well with me, and there are aspects of the movie that I want to see more of that Ayer has indicated we would see more of if and when his cut released, such as more of Jared Leto’s “mob boss” Joker as I call it. 

Yeah, I know how polarizing Leto’s Joker was on screen. Last year at the theater when a trailer for Todd Phillips’ Joker played on screen, at the end of it a person several rows ahead of me yelled out “It’s gotta be better than Leto!” which caused a few people to laugh out loud and me to loudly yell back “Really?” I liked Leto’s Joker and if we’re not going to see more of him in the DCEU going forward, then I would at least like to see the amount of his character that David Ayer wanted us to see, which by his own admission was more than the 10 minutes of one-liners and short term development we got from him. 

In addition to this, I want to see the original tone, edit and structure of what this film was supposed to be before the studio mangled it. If you’ve been following Ayer’s tweets and responses to others on the subject, it sounds fantastic. More development of the Harley-Joker dynamic, a different direction and ending for Enchantress, and much more of Steven Price’s score in the film just to name a few things. 

In essence, what we saw in that very first Comic-Con trailer in 2015 that was set to “I Started A Joke.” That trailer had a more serious tone with very different pacing and orchestration to it. That’s what I want to see. 

Let’s be clear here, the odds of this happening definitely increase with the planned existence of Zack Snyder’s Justice League, and likely any chance of the Ayer Cut being released surely depends on how that film does because it will provide more ammunition for HBO Max to release it as original content for the service, which in an odd way brings the association between Zack Snyder and David Ayer’s work full circle, but this time in a potentially positive sense. 

As happy as I am that Zack Snyder’s original intent for Justice League will see the light of day, I want the same for David Ayer’s original intent for Suicide Squad, not just because I want to see it, but because I believe in creative freedom and would ultimately consider the tortured production meddling chapter of that history book closed on the previous WB regime that thankfully is no longer in charge anymore. Let the multiverse heal all wounds in time. 

#ReleaseTheAyerCut