Director David Ayer continues to stand up for himself when it comes to stories surrounding his version of the 2016 Suicide Squad.
Although David Ayer’s Suicide Squad released half a decade ago, stories about its production continue to rumble, and have recently been thrown once more into sharp relief by the release of James Gunn’s reboot of the property, The Suicide Squad. Murmurs continue, especially in the wake of Zack Snyder’s Justice League, over a release of the Ayer Cut of Suicide Squad, with different accounts having differing opinions about, well, how different this version might be.
Ayer himself has spoken up once more to defend his version of the film, refuting a Gamestop blog entitled ‘Suicide Squad's ‘Ayer Cut’ didn’t actually test better with audiences than DC’s cut’. Ayer took to Twitter to seemingly claim that his cut was never test-screened against the studio cut, rather his cut of the theatrical version was exhibited against the studio-mandated version…
No wrong. Stop. The cuts tested were the studio cut and my version of the studio cut. This was literally the bat cut ;) https://t.co/TghNSc8o3b
— David Ayer (@DavidAyerMovies) August 15, 2021
Whilst Ayer has effectively disowned the theatrical cut of the film, producer Charles Roven also had this to say about the screening of the two cuts, stating that there was no clear ‘winner’ which in turn led to the messy cut which made it into cinemas: “That testing process, or what we call bake-off, that is not an unusual process. That happens, more than you might think. But most of the time, there is a clear winner. And usually, everybody agrees ‘well if we are going to do the bake-off, we should really go with the clear winner. Let the audience decide.’ In this case, there wasn’t a clear winner. It literally came to the exact same place. They just liked different parts of the movie. Different audiences commented on different parts of the movie they liked better or not. That doesn’t always work to create the best movie, to be honest, it’s an imprecise process…”
Frankly, the whole process seems to have been rather torturous and it’s easy to feel sympathy for Ayer who had certainly earned enough goodwill with films like End Of Watch to make the movie that he originally envisaged. As for the Ayer Cut, whilst Warner Bros has denied it will ever see the light of day, stranger things have happened…
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