David Ayer Has One Word For James Gunn's Total Creative Control On The Suicide Squad

The long wait to see James Gunn's "The Suicide Squad" is almost at an end, now that the anxiously-anticipated supervillain team-up slated to simultaneously hit theaters and HBO Max on August 6. And if the trailers for "The Suicide Squad" are any indication, Gunn has gone all out in putting his singular stamp on the film, delivering the sort of quippy dialogue and hard-R action fans of both his films — and the DC Comics source material — might expect.

Per Gunn himself, "The Suicide Squad" will indeed be film cut directly from his distinctive cinematic cloth, with the writer-director offering in a recent Twitter post he had complete creative control over the project. "When I first met with @wbpictures & @DCComics about #TheSuicideSquad I said it would need to be an R-rated war film with no-holds-barred. I am always up front with partners about what I want to do. They agreed. Once the rules were set we were off & running. I love this movie."

Gunn's new film is, of course, both a pseudo-sequel and reboot of David Ayer's 2016 film "Suicide Squad," which — in spite of a nearly $750 million box office take — was hardly a hit with fans, much less critics. Of course, that film's shortcomings weren't entirely on Ayer's shoulders as he was reportedly not given such control over his own film (per Cinema Blend). 

That fact is clearly still a sore point for Ayer, who, upon reading Gunn's post, tweeted a revealing response that stated, quite simply — "Dang." 

David Ayer's salty "Dang" one-liner is obviously quite telling of his experience. However, that tweet is not the first time he's spoken of what went down behind-the-scenes on his "Suicide Squad." The director has been quite vocal on the subject in the past year, as Warner Bros. and DC Entertainment bosses have been taken to task over shady doings. And in a tweet from October 2020, Ayer stated his film was "ripped to pieces" by studio brass late in post-production.

That shocking info came out after a fan prompted him about which scene was most difficult to cut from "Suicide Squad," with Ayer bluntly tweeting "The first 40-minutes." He later tweeted his own theory about what likely prompted the changes, "[T]he reason was BVS [Batman vs. Superman] got chewed up by the critics, and the success of Deadpool – the studio leadership at the time panicked. Then major elements of my cut were ripped out before I could mature the edit. Then [Geoff] Johns wrote pages I had to reshoot." Given those jaw-dropping details, his "Dang" is a dramatic understatement. Unfortunately, even as his fanbase has launched a #ReleaseTheAyerCut campaign, Warner Bros. has no intention of releasing Ayer's version of the film (via The AV Club). 

It seems studio bosses may have learned their lesson, however, by giving James Gunn free rein on "The Suicide Squad." 

Gunn, meanwhile, responded to Ayer: "Although a lot of the major players at Warners were different people, there was no doubt their troubles with you helped to pave an easier path for me, David, so I'm very grateful for that, and for everything else you did to help this movie along its path."