Movies are a complicated business, and not all of them ever make it to the screen in quite the way they were designed. There have been so many questions over the years regarding David Ayer’s Suicide Squad and what that movie was supposed to be, and yet with every new piece of information, we seem to get more questions than answers.
While few people have ever been willing to talk about just what happened behind the scenes of Suicide Squad, one of the things that we really thought we knew was that the big reason that the movie went through such significant re-editing was test audiences simply didn’t like Ayer’s original concept. However, in a (now deleted) tweet, Ayer claims that is actually incorrect, as no test audience ever saw his cut. The director said…
Nope. Not true at all. I made a drama. Studio wanted a comedy. Madness ensued. My cut was never tested or screened for an audience.
This info does fall in line with some of what we had heard about Suicide Squad. Specifically, the idea that the version of the film that was recut following the release of the “Bohemian Rhapsody” trailer, which was very well recieved and was significantly different from whatever Ayer had originally produced.
Suicide Squad had followed the release of Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, which both critics and numerous moviegoers found too dark. Whether WB was looking for a more “fun” movie from the start or only after the Dawn of Justice returns, is unclear. However, it seems that Ayer’s version was never even allowed to stand on its own before it was reconfigured into the film that we got.
Apparently Warner Bros. always wanted something lighter in tone, and when Ayer presented something that wasn’t, that’s when, in his words, “madness ensued.” That part at least sounds right. Suicide Squad would see some combination of significant reshoots and equally significant re-editing into a movie that, to be fair, audiences did go to see in droves. The movie was lambasted by critics, but was a smash hit at the box office.
In much the same vein as the “Release the Snyder Cut Movement” which saw fans campaign to see Zack Snyder’s original vision of Justice League and was successful, in that we did eventually get Zack Snyder’s Justice League, fans have wanted to see the “Ayer Cut” of Suicide Squad, if only to see what that movie originally was. While the campaign has never truly died, it’s also never reached quite the heights of the Snyder Cut movement, so such a release seems unlikely.
But honestly, now I’m more interested in the Ayer Cut than ever before. If nobody has ever actually seen it (beyond, we assume, studio execs) then maybe the original concept would be something audiences would love. They’ve apparently never had the chance to find out.