David Ayer is hoping his cut of the 2016 DC Studios film Suicide Squad gets released one day.
In the meantime, he’s explaining to his fans what the key differences were between the Joker character played by Jared Leto from his original vision to what was eventually released in theaters.
“Joker is formidable intense and a force of nature in my cut. Not unfocused and silly. In my cut he has a story arc that hangs powerfully over the entire film,” posted on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter. “In the studio cut he’s a prop not a character.”
In a recent interview, Ayer expressed why it was important for his cut of Suicide Squad to be released.
“I’m going to be hopeful. You know, there are a lot of people that are invested in certain narratives that don’t want it to see the light of day,” Ayer told Total Film. “So there’s an immense political headwind against it, because if that cut were made public, the cowardliness and the whole just general shittiness of how the film’s been treated, and how the actors have had this great work that they’d done taken away…”
He continued, “That narrative blows up once people see the movie. But it’s coming. Something’s going to happen. Something’s going to be revealed. The truth always comes out. It always comes out.”
Ayer had previously revealed DC Studios co-head James Gunn was open to eventually releasing his cut of Suicide Squad at some point.
“All I know is my unseen film plays much better than the studio release,” Ayer said on X back in August. “The interest in my cut being show[n] seems real and organic. And Gunn told me it would have it’s [sic] time to be shared. He absolutely deserves to launch his DC universe without more drama about old projects. In a way I’m chained to this thing. I’m riding a tiger here and navigating this situation the best I can. Life is a very strange journey.”
Gunn directed the sequel to Suicide Squad titled The Suicide Squad (2021) which, for the most part, took a different direction from Ayer’s vision and only gave continuity to a few elements from the previous film.