Suicide Squad is in theaters today, and already, fans are wondering what to expect from the film's home release. Joker actor Jared Leto made clear that a number of Joker scenes were left on the cutting room floor, which led some fans to speculate that perhaps an extended cut of Suicide Squad was in the cards.
Judging from recent comments made by director David Ayer, that doesn't appear to be the case. Ayer does confirm that more than 10 minutes worth of footage was left on the cutting room floor, but if the scenes do appear on the film's home release, it will be in the form of deleted scenes and not a second cut of the movie.
"We have a chunk, there's definitely over 10 minutes of material on there," Ayer says in an interview with Collider. "But this cut of the movie is my cut, there's no sort of parallel universe version of the movie, the released movie is my cut. And that's one of the toughest things about writing, shooting, and directing a film, is you end up with these orphans and you f---ing love them and you think they'd be amazing scenes and do these amazing things but the film is a dictatorship (laughs), not a democracy, and just because something's cool and charismatic doesn't mean it gets to survive in the final cut. The flow of the movie is the highest master."
It sounds like Ayer believes the theatrical version of the film to be the best version of Suicide Squad, something that wasn't the case with Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. An extended cut of that film recently arrived on Blu-ray and video on-demand, adding an additional 30 minutes to the already-long film. Ayer goes on in the interview to describe the process of putting such a massive film like Suicide Squad together.
"So it's always a moving target as you try and distill and condense down to the best movie," he says. "And this thing was a beast, we had over a million and a half feet of footage, with an ensemble movie, seven plus major characters that we have to introduce, a very complex story that is not your normal linear story and you're introducing the audience to a whole new world, plus it just has my sort of sickness as a filmmaker in it, my vibe and attitude. So it just took a lot of work to find the movie, the movie was always there and even in the early cuts we knew we had something, we knew it was going to work, but to get it there ... wow."
Suicide Squad is generally being reviewed more favorably than Zack Snyder's Batman v Superman, but not by much. The film currently holds an average Rotten Tomatoes score of 27 out of 100.
