Jared Leto still wants the Ayer Cut of Suicide Squad: “That’s what streaming’s for, right?”
David Ayer quickly chimed in on social media, suggesting that AT&T had a duty to its shareholders to release his preferred version of the 2016 film
Aux News Suicide Squad
Jared Leto has once again made a pitch for Warner Bros. to release the David Ayer cut of 2016's Suicide Squad, noting—after being prompted with a question about the unseen cut of the film by Variety’s Marc Malkin at a House Of Gucci event this weekend—that “That’s what streaming’s for, right?”
Ayer—who’d previously sworn off talking about the sore subject of his 2016 supervillain odyssey—chimed in on Twitter to co-sign the sentiment, going so far as to tag Warner Media parent company ATT and suggest that it had a veritable duty to its shareholders to release his personal and preferred cut of the film. (Leto doesn’t seem quite as gung-ho, to be fair; given that he walked away pretty quickly after his chipper “Why not?” he might be a bit over this particular rat-gifting portion of his acting career.)
The one thing just about everyone can agree about, re: Suicide Squad, is that nobody was exactly happy with the end result.
Audiences responded well enough, admittedly, dropping a respectable, if not exceptional, $746 million on the movie at the box office. But everybody else—critics, Warner Bros. execs, the film’s stars, and director Ayer himself—had their issues with the film, which was reportedly heavily chopped and screwed in the editing bay in order to combat accusations that the DC Comics film properties (then firmly in the hands of cinematic architect Zack Snyder) were all overly dour sad-fests.
The subsequent, and fitful, #ReleaseTheAyerCut campaign, i.e., Ayer’s own efforts to hashtag his way into a movement similar to the one that finally caused Warner Media to relent and release Snyder’s cut of Justice League, has been a weird shadow sibling to the Snyder Cut revolts. Ayer, at least, remains passionate about his “soulful drama,” which he clearly feels was butchered by a misunderstanding studio. And the film’s stars—including Joel Kinnaman, one of the few who stuck around between the first film and its James Gunn-helmed sequel—have said at various times that they’d like to see it released.
All of which presumably remains thoroughly annoying to Warner, which has gone out of its way to say it has no intentions of ever releasing Ayer’s version of the movie. Despite the fact that Ayer has claimed his version of the film is much closer to a release-able state than the Snyder Cut (which cost more than $100 million to finish) was, Warner Bros. has made it clear there’s just no profit, fiscally or conceptually, for them to revisit a poorly regarded part of a chapter of its history the studio would clearly like to close the book on. Their shareholders, presumably, have yet to make their feelings on the company’s “mandate to monetize” known.
49 Comments
We need to pass a law that allows for the defenestration of Jared Leto…As for the “Ayer Cut”: WB already spent $100 Million polishing Snyder’s turd. What makes anybody think that it’d make any fiscal sense to spend $100 Million more polishing another?Honestly a part of me would rather see it destroyed just to spite the whiney Snyder Cultists who frame Snyder as a White Savior and use marginalized people as props by claiming people as props to claim that they are being oppressed because not everyone likes the movies they like.
God help me, I think I’m starting to come around on the dude.
If I come out of the Morbius screening smiling, just shoot me.
To be honest, I can’t even remember why I signed up for the “I Hate Jared Leto” fanclub … something about a stupid face tattoo? Shitty band? WhTF are you in Blade Runner 2049?Yeah, Leto past performance not factored in, Morbius actually looks pretty fun.
[Steps out of his Morbius showing and notices that the floor is covered with plastic sheeting.]CAPTAIN SPLENDID: Aw, n— [BLAM]
If that law were passed, you’d need to set up some kind of lotto system to decide who gets the privilege of de-Letoing our planet.
They already spent $100m on making a turd. They could probably stand to make a substantial profit investing another $5m polishing the damn thing.
Releasing the Snyder Cut when they did made a lot of sense because COVID had shut down all productions and the HBO Max service desperately needed exclusive content. Ayer says that releasing his cut of Suicide Squad wouldn’t cost anywhere near as much as the Snyder Cut because unlike Justice League, he was never fired.Studios release alternate cuts of movies all the time. It was a quick way to get people to buy the same movie again. Why not just dump the Ayer Cut out there and give everyone what they want? Proponents are happy and detractors who will never watch it get to tell proponents, “Nyah, nyah, see? It still sucks.”
Saying it won’t cost as much as Zack Snyder’s Justice League is not the same as saying it will be cheap enough to make financial sense. It’s still a CGI heavy superhero film, and Ayer doesn’t command a rabid cult like Snyder who can be relied upon to turn out for it.I say that as someone who kinda would like to see it, if only as a filmmaking curiosity.
Supposedly, it doesn’t need any money for CGI. It’s an alternate cut, not an uncompleted one.
Are you sure? Just because they’d edited the movie together, doesn’t they’d finished the effects shots in it. Don’t forget that Snyder claimed his cut of Justice League was locked in before he left (although that was probably bullshit, and he definitely made changes when he came back).I don’t know the full timeline, but there was less than a month between the end of principal photography (June 24th), and the Comic-con teaser trailer that ultimately led to the film being reworked (July 11th), and more than a year after that before it was released. Once the whole competing edits thing kicked in (presumably while the trailer buzz was still hot), they would’ve almost certainly targeted the effects houses on stuff most likely to make the final cut (i.e. what’s in both versions) and avoided having them do much work on shots that might not make it until a decision had been made. In this case, the opening 40 minutes of Ayer’s cut apparently only survived as a handful of flashbacks in the theatrical version. It’s extremely unlikely that whole sequence was completed to release standard and only afterwards had most of it hacked out of the movie.
I’m not sure. I have no connection with anyone involved, but I have read Ayer’s comments, and he’s been consistent about not much needing to be done. With Justice League, an entirely different director came in and reshot large chunks of the movie. With Suicide Squad, which uses much more practical effects and sets to begin with, that isn’t the case.I’m not saying nothing needs to be done. I have no idea what would need to be done. But I would like to see it, even without completed VFX.
They wouldn’t have to spend anywhere near $100 million to release the Ayer cut. With the Snyder cut, they had to redo all the effects for Snyder’s footage because post was never completed on that stuff before Whedon reshot the entire third act and large chunks of the rest of the movie. The Snyder “cut” as it existed prior to Justice League’s release was just greenscreen footage.There is an actual Ayers cut that was chopped up by a trailer-producing post house after bad test screenings. It’s probably not much better than the theatrical version, but it’s not like making a brand new movie.
You’re doing more whining than anybody as per usual.
I wish there was as much fervor to restore the original, long version of a film that actual deserves it – The Assassination of Jesse James.
There’s a better version? Cuz I fucking love the one we have, so yes please to more.
It’s just another two hours of Brad Pitt staring intensely at Casey Affleck, but it’s totally worth it.
Heck, if that’s the additional material, I wouldn’t mind a “Extra Footage Only Edition” …
Yeeeeees! I just saw the film recently for the first time, damn good! I wouldn’t mind an extended Epilogue as all my favorite parts were post assassination. Man that last scene with the narration is a thing of beauty. The lights went out of his eyes before he could think of the proper words.
Dave, they’re already acting in the best interests of shareholders by not inflicting more Jared Leto upon the world.
Just to piss Ayer off, I’d like WB to release ‘Suicide Squad: The Snyder Cut’.
In that case I vote for ‘Suicide Squad: The Wheden Cut’ and just burn everything to the ground.
Well the Ayer cut of Justice League was better… . It was still awful, but it was better. So, maybe?
I crapped my pants when Harley Quinn and Joker killed Darkseid.
Both original films are so bad that a director’s cut is almost guaranteed to be an improvement, but they’ll still kind of suck regardless.
How in the fuck does a professional writer not know that “releasable” is a word?
Twenty bucks says Hughes called his mom when he got to ”professional writer.”
I don’t know if this is an unpopular opinion, but I ultimately didn’t mind the Snyder Cut. Once you ignore the way it was conceived and the dumb slow-mo bits, it was an okay if self-serious superhero movie.
So an Ayer Cut of Suicide Squad… sure.
That’s because if you ignore the dumb slo-mo bits, the movie is only 34 minutes long.
I would’ve been fine with if it was cut back to a 2.5 hour version that realistically would’ve been released rather than dumping seemingly everything that was recorded into one obnoxiously overly long film like the Snyder Cut ended up being (and kind of proved there wasn’t really a Snyder cut per se but a workprint version). It’s better than the theatrical version, but it still has all the same flaws as the other Snyder films.
If the film had simply stopped at the end of the story, I would have said it was an enjoyable couple of hours of a teenage boy’s wrongheaded attempts to make the comics he loved when he was six still relevant to a fifteen-year-old’s mindset.
If it had just stopped. But no, it went on, and on, and on. It has more endings than Return of the King. But that movie used those endings to resolve the threads of three movies. No, the Snyder Cut just kept flinging shit at the wall, introducing new stuff that had no relevance to what had gone before, just to say “here’s what you could have won if you’d appreciated Zack’s genius”. By the final credits, I truly resented having paid to watch this self-indulgent car crash.
As a fairly comic book agnostic person I kinda enjoyed it more than some of the marvel fare? Watching on a Sunday afternoon with breaks treating it as a miniseries alleviated pacing issues/length. It was pretty trash but it was distinct, it felt like someone was trying to make an interesting film even if half the time it didn’t quite work. I’ll always have more time for stuff that feels somewhat personal and tries something even when that fails.It probably helped I’d not seen any of snyders other dc films so it did feel like a sorta fresh take on comic book films
I don’t think that’s an out-there opinion. I agree, but will add (and this wasn’t that unpopular of an opinion at the time, but might be now) that other than Cavill’s face occasionally looking like a CGI nightmare, I didn’t really mind the Justice League theatrical cut, either.Ayer cut of Suicide Squad, though? No thanks. Nothing that I saw in the theatrical made me feel there was a better movie or even a more interesting idea that’d been sacrificed to try to turn it into a comedy. More importantly Ayer isn’t that interesting of a filmmaker. Even when I hate Snyder’s films, he has a distinct visual style and his choices are often fascinating because he takes big cuts at bad ideas. I don’t think any Ayer movie has ever been ambitious enough that I’d say, “I’d really like to see more of that.”
…a veritable duty to its shareholders…Yeah, sure pal. Dumping large amounts of cash into a product that they know there will be no tangible return on is the height of corporate fiscal responsibility.
I’ve heard the Ayer cut has much more of Leto’s Joker in it. No wonder Warner Bros doesn’t want it released.
If there was ever a Joker with his finger on the pulse of a lived in society…
No thanks.
Is Jared Leto still a thing? I hardly noticed.
I’m down. Release the Ayer Cut!
“That’s what streaming’s for, right? No, I’m really asking. I have no idea what streaming is.”
The Ayer Cut ain’t happening. I mean, they hired James Gunn to make a whole other Suicide Squad movie. Warner Bros. preferred to spend $185 million to make another movie instead of just releasing a new cut of a movie they already made. That seems to indicate that they didn’t highly of Ayer’s version.
No offense to Ayers, or to directors in general, but… a lot of director’s cuts are self indulgent rambling messes. Sometimes I just want the editor’s cut.
It’s definitely a case by case thing. Lord of the Rings, Alien 3 and Blade Runner all benefited from their alternate cuts.See also: films like Army of Darkness and I am Legend that had their endings changed.
And then there’s Coppola, desperately trying to make ‘his’ version of Apocalypse Now better than the theatrical version. Stop fucking with a classic Francis. At least trying to fix Godfather Part 3 makes sense, because there were things worth fixing.
It’s definitely a case by case thing. It is for sure. I loved the Peter Jackson ones, and… whichever Blade Runner it was without the narration. But my favorite director’s cut? Blood Simple, which the Coens removed a couple of minutes from.
I just rewatched Gunn’s Suicide Squad for the first time since it debuted, and it’s such a nice antidote to this poison.
The Snyder Cut ended up being, if not a great film, at least much better than what was released in theaters. Maybe the Ayer cut of Suicide Squad would end up being better, too. But if Warner doesn’t want to spend the money to find out, that’s their call, and I can’t blame them. They had a reason to fund the Snyder Cut (need to attract subscribers to a new service that had a dearth of new material due to the pandemic). They don’t have a reason to pony up fro Ayer’s vision.
No amount of cutting can save that dumpster fire.
If all that is required is editing, then yeah they should release it. I dont think its worth spending 100million on like the justice league rerelease, but if it requires a minimal investment then its worth it.
Jared Leto is an excellent actor and did a great job with the Joker character. The hate against him for it is very odd.