Suicide Squad Director Says Theatrical Cut Is His Cut

With reviewers giving Suicide Squad a Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice-style pummelling, it wasn’t long before audiences started to speculate that the film’s young, sought-after director would have an Ultimate Cut-style alternate take coming to video down the line.

It seems as though that’s not very likely, with filmmaker David Ayer saying in a new interview that the version of Suicide Squad opening in just a few hours on the East Coast is “his cut” of the film.

While there’s plenty of material on the cutting room floor that might make a compelling watch-through on DVD special features, Ayer told Collider:

“We have a chunk, there’s definitely over 10 minutes of material on there. 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.”

Of course, that doesn’t preclude Ayer taking a run at an “extended” cut, particularly given how well Batman v Superman has done on the home video market by promising a longer, better version of the same film. At present, though, it doesn’t sound like he’s got an idea what such a cut would look like.

The end of that story, then, is likely yet to be told. If the film does well theatrically and the expected spinoffs and sequels start to be greenlit, then Ayer will likely be too busy working on at least one of those films to sit in an editing room reevaluating a movie that’s already been completed. If the movie has a massive second-week drop a la Batman v Superman, it wouldn’t be hard to imagine Warner asking him to take another pass at it for the home video market.

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?

Suicide Squad hits theaters August 5, 2016.