Jared Leto Says to Release the Ayer Cut

By Russ Burlingame

A couple of times in recent months, Suicide Squad director David Ayer took to social media to share Joker-centric behind-the-scenes photos from the film. Ayer has repeatedly praised actor Jared Leto's much-maligned take on The Joker, who had a much bigger role in the original cut of Suicide Squad. The relationship between Joker and Harley Quinn was apparently a significant aspect of the movie originally, with Leto having once said that there was enough cut footage to make a whole movie out of it. So it's maybe no surprise that Leto is down to see what Ayer's original vision was.

Asked about the idea of releasing David Ayer's director's cut of the film on HBO Max, Leto was definitive. He'd love to see Ayer get the Zack Snyder treatment.

"Absolutely," Leto told Variety. "Why not? Why wouldn't they? That's what streaming's for, right?"

You can see the clip below.

Whereas the Snyder Cut needed a significant investment to complete it, since Snyder left during production on the film, Ayer's cut is a different story. Supposedly all of the photography was completed, and only some visual effects work would have remained. Ayer's cut of the film was supposedly screened in a completed form for Warner Bros. executives before they asked for more edits, and kicked off a process the resulted in the final theatrical version of the movie.

"I put my life into Suicide Squad," Ayer recently wrote in an open letter. "I made something amazing. My cut is intricate and emotional journey with some bad people who are shit 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. A handful of people have seen it."

Warner Bros. has previously shot down the idea of releasing the Ayer Cut, with studio exec Ann Sarnoff saying that they would "not be developing" the director's version of the film.

James Gunn's The Suicide Squad is available now on DVD, Blu-ray, and Digital.

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