Suicide Squad Director David Ayer Blasts Studio Cut Of His Film in Open Letter

David Ayer, director of Suicide Squad, took to social media today to once again assert that the movie released to theaters bears little resemblance to his director’s cut. While praising James Gunn’s The Suicide Squad, Ayer bristled at audiences and critics who are using its warm reception to take shots at Ayer’s 2016 movie. Much like Zack Snyder with Justice League (at least prior to the announcement of his director’s cut), Ayer has elected not to speak publicly about his disagreements with the studio, which he said is a matter of old-school professionalism, and not something he plans to change.

Still, he said, the movie that made it to theaters wasn’t his film, and that his silence on the matter meant absorbing a lot of criticism, some of it very personal. The comments, made via a trio of screenshots, was posted in response to a critic who said that he reacted to liking James Gunn’s film by wishing Ayer would stop pursuing a director’s cut of his film. Gunn, for his part, responded to Ayer’s open letter with a supportive tweet sending him “all my love and admiration.”

“I put my life into Suicide Squad,” Ayer wrote in a missive, which he captioned “My turn” in the tweet. “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.”

You can see the full statement below.

Fans lobbying to release Ayer’s cut of Suicide Squad are planning a “trending event” on Twitter on August 5, which is both the five-year anniversary of that movie’s release and the eve of Gunn’s film releasing in theaters and on HBO Max. Whereas Zack Snyder’s cut of Justice League required a good deal of visual effects and editing cleanup to make it releasable, Ayer and others familiar with the situation have claimed that his director’s cut of Suicide Squad would require very little work and cost almost nothing.

Warner Bros. has previously shot down the idea, with studio exec Ann Sarnoff saying that they would “not be developing” Ayer’s cut.