Suicide Squad (2016) director David Ayer has shared a new look at Jared Leto’s Joker – if only to keep the embers of fan desire to see his cut of the film burning. The photo show’s Leto as Joker, dressed in an extravagant tux-style suit – only one embroidered with some pretty ostentatious golden lace work, including a giant skull on one lapel, and an Illuminati eye on the other. Ayer captioned the photo with “Experiments,” to give fans a further hint of everything they tried with Leto’s iteration of Joker.
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It should surprise no one that Leto’s Joker remains one of the most divisive portrayals of the character yet. However, a lot of that is arguably due to the fact that Leto never got to show the full-fledged version of his Joker, having to settle for the hackneyed bits that made it into the theatrical version.
“This is an extraordinary case of a movie being utterly re-engineered in post. It’s not a couple cut scenes being added,” Ayer previously admitted on Twitter. “The nature of the film was fundamentally changed. I’m looking you in the eye telling you this. My cut is vastly better.”
Ayer has gone on to stress to DC fans how much he did for his version of the film:
“I put my life into Suicide Squad. I made something amazing. My cut is an 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.”
Suicide Squad is now streaming on HBO Max.
It feels good to be bad…Assemble a team of the world’s most dangerous, incarcerated Super Villains, provide them with the most powerful arsenal at the government’s disposal, and send them off on a mission to defeat an enigmatic, insuperable entity. U.S. intelligence officer Amanda Waller has determined only a secretly convened group of disparate, despicable individuals with next to nothing to lose will do. However, once they realize they weren’t picked to succeed but chosen for their patent culpability when they inevitably fail, will the Suicide Squad resolve to die trying, or decide it’s every man for himself?
