Director’s cut of Suicide Squad is a “soulful drama” with a complex Joker

Just the other week, Warner Bros. announced it would be pouring millions of dollars into finishing the Synder Cut, a new version of the movie Justice League that preserves Zack Snyder’s original vision, and then releasing it on HBO Max sometimes next year. And now, demands for director’s cuts seem to be everywhere. Just the other day, we wrote about a petition with tens of thousands of signatures asking for George Lucas to release a four-hour cut of Revenge of the Sith, and director David Ayer got on Twitter to talk up his cut of his panned 2016 superhero romp Suicide Squad, which he says Warner Bros. cut to shreds.

And to be fair, it’s not hard to imagine Warner Bros. meddling in its DC superhero movies; there’s a reason the DC Extended Universe gained a reputation for lack of quality, although movies like Wonder Woman and Shazam! are starting to turn that around. In any case, Ayer took to Twitter to gave us some more insight into just how his movie became the scattershot mess it is:

So the first trailer is an indication of what he was going for? Let’s see:

That does look intense, although it’s not nearly as fun as the “Bohemian Rhapsody” trailer:

I sympathize that Ayer had his movie chopped up, but I dunno, were we ever going to get a “soulful drama” out of a movie where a crocodile man teams up with a girl who can trap souls in her sword teams up with Captain Boomerang? Let’s keep reading:

In the finished version of the movie, Jared Leto’s Joker kind of comes across as a try-hard edgeboy Juggalo. I can believe there’s a better version of him somewhere on the cutting room floor, at least.

Joker is another on that’s helping turn around the DC superhero stable of movies, although that one succeeded in part because it was allowed to be its own thing, rather than being part of a bigger shared universe. It was always gonna be harder to keep the tone of Suicide Squad consistent with the other DCEU movies.

And David Ayer isn’t alone in lamenting how the studio chopped up his movie. Birds of Prey director Cathy Yan also weighed in:

#ReleaseTheAyerCut? #ReleaseTheYanCut? How far are we gonna take this?

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