The formative years of the DCEU were reportedly rife with heavy-handed studio interference, something the franchise still hasn’t fully escaped from given the extensive reshoots that were ordered for Birds of Prey, but no project was affected more than David Ayer’s Suicide Squad.
Having only been given six weeks to write the script in order to get the antihero ensemble into production as soon as possible, Ayer was then forced to bow to pressure from Warner Bros. to lighten the tone of the movie following the negative reception to the relentlessly grim Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice, and the filmmaker hasn’t been shy in admitting that his original vision was heavily compromised as a result.
There were even two competing cuts of Suicide Squad assembled in post-production by separate teams of editors, with the one that fared better with test audiences getting the nod for theatrical release. It may have earned almost $750 million at the box office, but the titular team are already in the midst of being rebooted by James Gunn, with Ayer left to defend his divisive take on the source material online.
The home video release of Suicide Squad came with a bonus extended version that added thirteen minutes of extra footage, but from the sounds of things, a lot more than that got left on the cutting room floor, and we’ve now heard that the studio are considering releasing Ayer’s original cut of the movie as an HBO Max exclusive.
According to our sources – the same ones who told us Justice League Dark and Green Lantern shows are coming to the aforementioned streaming platform – WB are looking to generate some buzz to draw in new subscribers and they see an alternate version of Suicide Squad as one surefire way of doing it. After all, it would be simple enough to put the Ayer Cut together at virtually no expense given that it’s already completed, while fans would no doubt be curious to see how Suicide Squad was originally intended to play out.
That being said, it also seems like a cynical move on the studio’s part to try and divert attention away from the Snyder Cut of Justice League, which seems increasingly unlikely to see the light of day. In any case, this is far from a done deal just yet but again, due to the ease of putting it together, we’ve heard that releasing it is definitely something that’s being discussed right now.
