Jared Leto still wants the Ayer Cut of Suicide Squad: "That's what streaming's for, right?"
David Ayer quickly chimed in on social media, suggesting that AT&T had a duty to its shareholders to release his preferred version of the 2016 film
Jared Leto has once again made a pitch for Warner Bros. to release the David Ayer cut of 2016's Suicide Squad, noting—after being prompted with a question about the unseen cut of the film by Variety’s Marc Malkin at a House Of Gucci event this weekend—that “That’s what streaming’s for, right?”
Ayer—who’d previously sworn off talking about the sore subject of his 2016 supervillain odyssey—chimed in on Twitter to co-sign the sentiment, going so far as to tag Warner Media parent company ATT and suggest that it had a veritable duty to its shareholders to release his personal and preferred cut of the film. (Leto doesn’t seem quite as gung-ho, to be fair; given that he walked away pretty quickly after his chipper “Why not?” he might be a bit over this particular rat-gifting portion of his acting career.)
The one thing just about everyone can agree about, re: Suicide Squad, is that nobody was exactly happy with the end result.
Audiences responded well enough, admittedly, dropping a respectable, if not exceptional, $746 million on the movie at the box office. But everybody else—critics, Warner Bros. execs, the film’s stars, and director Ayer himself—had their issues with the film, which was reportedly heavily chopped and screwed in the editing bay in order to combat accusations that the DC Comics film properties (then firmly in the hands of cinematic architect Zack Snyder) were all overly dour sad-fests.
The subsequent, and fitful, #ReleaseTheAyerCut campaign, i.e., Ayer’s own efforts to hashtag his way into a movement similar to the one that finally caused Warner Media to relent and release Snyder’s cut of Justice League, has been a weird shadow sibling to the Snyder Cut revolts. Ayer, at least, remains passionate about his “soulful drama,” which he clearly feels was butchered by a misunderstanding studio. And the film’s stars—including Joel Kinnaman, one of the few who stuck around between the first film and its James Gunn-helmed sequel—have said at various times that they’d like to see it released.
All of which presumably remains thoroughly annoying to Warner, which has gone out of its way to say it has no intentions of ever releasing Ayer’s version of the movie. Despite the fact that Ayer has claimed his version of the film is much closer to a release-able state than the Snyder Cut (which cost more than $100 million to finish) was, Warner Bros. has made it clear there’s just no profit, fiscally or conceptually, for them to revisit a poorly regarded part of a chapter of its history the studio would clearly like to close the book on. Their shareholders, presumably, have yet to make their feelings on the company’s “mandate to monetize” known.