James Gunn’s The Suicide Squad is on everybody’s lips at the moment. How could it not be? A brand new DCEU movie is always cause for plenty of internet chatter, if not outright celebration, and in the case of The Suicide Squad, it comes from one of the only directors who has managed to put an auteur’s stamp on a blockbuster-sized superhero movie. It’s been warmly received by critics, currently boasting (as of this writing) a 97% on Rotten Tomatoes.
And since Gunn’s new film, while technically IS a sequel to 2016’s Suicide Squad movie, it plays it as loose as possible with that, in part because of the critical savaging the first David Ayer movie received. But for years, there have been whispers (well, more than whispers) that the theatrical cut of Suicide Squad wasn’t the film Ayer intended to make, and that the movie was re-cut in a panic after brutal reviews of Zack Snyder’s Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice six months earlier. And to be fair, it wasn’t entirely undeserved: the finished product was bizarrely edited, with little character development, and painfully on-the-nose needle drops at virtually every opportunity, all in an attempt to lighten the perceived darkness brought on by Batman v Superman and perhaps inject a little Guardians of the Galaxy “misfits set to cool tunes” vibes into the proceedings.
It didn’t work.
Shortly after, Zack Snyder stepped away from directing Justice League and that film was given a similarly bizarre makeover in his absence. But word soon spread that Snyder’s original vision was far more complete than anyone suspected (and further away from the finished product than we imagined), and the internet began to clamor for the release of “the Snyder Cut,” which HBO Max finally obliged them with earlier this year. And once it became apparent that this kind of thing could be done, and with Ayer occasionally offering teases of what his original plan for Suicide Squad included, “the Ayer Cut” similarly became a subject of internet discourse.
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