Suicide Squad: Director David Ayer disowns 2016 film – ‘The studio cut is not my movie’

Supervillain team-up blockbuster was critically panned

Filmmaker David Ayer has spoken out against the “studio cut” of his widely panned 2016 supervillain film Suicide Squad.

His comments come amid the release of The Suicide Squad, a loosely connected sequel-reboot directed by Guardians of the Galaxy’s James Gunn.

Reviews for The Suicide Squad have been positive, with reviewers comparing it favourably to Ayer’s own film.

In a post shared to Twitter, however, the filmmaker seemed to defend his own intentions in making the 2016 original, and implied that studio interference had resulted in a finished film that was not of his own liking.

“I put my life into Suicide Squad,” he wrote, as part of the lengthy statement. “I made something amazing. My cut is an intricate and emotional journey with some bad people who are s*** on and discarded (a theme that resonates in my soul). The studio cut is not my movie. Read that again.”

“And my cut is not the 10 week director’s cut – it’s a fully mature edit by Lee Smith standing on the incredible work by John Gilroy. It’s all Steven Price’s brilliant score, with not a single radio song in the whole thing. It has traditional character arcs, amazing performances, a solid third-act resolution,” he wrote. “A handful of people have seen it. If someone says they have seen it, they haven’t.”

You can read the full statement here:

Back in 2017, another DC Extended Universe film, Justice League, was released to similarly poor reviews, after the film’s original director Zack Snyder left production partway through.

Fans of the franchise campaigned for the release of the “Snyder Cut”, a hypothetical re-edit of the film spearheaded by Snyder himself, without the involvement of replacement director Joss Whedon.

After HBO Max commissioned the development of Zack Snyder’s Justice League last year, some fans also began demanding the release of the “Ayer Cut” of Suicide Squad.

However, Warner Bros CEO Ann Sarnoff has previously shut down the suggestion and insisted that a Suicide Squad re-edit is not forthcoming.