Highlights
- Director David Ayer reveals his last wish for the embattled film Suicide Squad: a funeral screening to bring the cast and crew together for closure.
- Ayer expresses his frustration over Warner Bros. taking away his vision for the film and describes the experience as having the “guts ripped out” of him.
- The negative reception of Suicide Squad continues to affect Ayer, but he acknowledges that James Gunn’s 2021 film The Suicide Squad has been better received.
While 2016’s Suicide Squad seems destined to be remembered negatively after director David Ayer’s seemingly given op on the ‘Ayer Cut’ release, the embattled filmmaker has one more wish concerning his work.
Suicide Squad was received in an overwhelmingly negative light, with critics and fans alike expressing dissatisfaction with the film overall. Director Ayer would reveal that the film put out to audiences wasn’t his, alleging that Warner Bros had ruined his vision for Suicide Squad, especially when it came to Jared Leto’s now-infamous take on the Joker.
Since that revelation, there has been a strong push by some fans for an Ayer cut of Suicide Squad to be released similar to the Snyder cut of Justice League that was released after similar fan pressure. Ayer himself was a big supporter of the movement right up until recently when the director seemingly gave up on the Ayer cut of Suicide Squad being released via a post on social media. While this is still the case, Ayer has revealed that he has one last wish for the project via a recent interview with Variety. “I would love a ‘last rites’ screening,” Ayer revealed. “A funeral screening, you know, even just bringing the cast and crew together to show them what they actually made. That would be fair for everyone.” Ayer continued to defend his version of Suicide Squad.
I made a great movie. I made an amazing film. I’ll go on record. Anyone wants to dispute that: Come look me in the eye. To have something I put so much love and so much heart into get taken away, reengineered… you know that Eric Andre meme where he shoots the guy and says, ‘Why’d you do that?’ That’s been like ‘Suicide Squad.’ ‘Why’d you do that?’ I didn’t.
Ayer also revealed how Suicide Squad‘s infamy still affects him to this day, despite the derided version of the movie not being his own. “Every time a new movie comes out in that space it starts up again,” the filmmaker revealed, discussing the fallout. “I get attacked for something that I didn’t do. It’s pretty unjust, and at the end of the day, at this point, I get it: it’s corporate America. It’s corporate IP. You know these are multi-billion dollar companies, but I think ripping the guts out of a filmmaker like that is pretty unfair.” Ayer also described the fiasco surrounding the film as the toughest part of his career, a state of affairs made ironic by Shia LaBeouf warning Ayer against directing Suicide Squad after they worked together on a prior project.
At this point, all but the most diehard fans of the director have come to accept that an Ayer cut probably wouldn’t improve Suicide Squad much, especially in light of the much better received and reviewed attempt from current DC Studios boss James Gunn in 2021’s The Suicide Squad, which did justice to the team in live action and spawned a spinoff TV series. Even Ayer seems to see this, and his request for a funeral screening seems to be more about closure and maybe some potential validation of the superiority of his cut.
While the sentiment is one that many creatives and even some fans can empathize with, the DCEU era’s closure following the release of Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom in December has effectively consigned the potential re-release to one of many things that DC fans might miss about the DCEU now that it’s in the past. As for Ayer, he’s already shown that he can move on to better, if not bigger, things with his more recent work.
Suicide Squad (2016) is currently available for streaming on Max.
Suicide Squad
A secret government agency recruits some of the most dangerous incarcerated super-villains to form a defensive task force. Their first mission: save the world from the apocalypse.
Source: Variety
