It’s no secret anymore that Warner Bros. meddled with the visions of Zack Snyder and David Ayer in the quest to craft a better DCEU. However, where Snyder later received a sense of justice in the release of his Justice League cut, Ayer remains hanging out to dry.
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The push for his version of Suicide Squad to see completion began shortly after the #ReleaseTheSnyderCut campaign. Up until today, the fabled Ayer Cut generated a similar buzz that led to DC Studio head James Gunn remarking that Ayer’s vision will have its day.
However, something changed much like the way regimes at Warner Bros. shift and churn. The Beekeeper director tells The Hollywood Reporter that the studio isn’t getting back to him lately. “It’s been radio silent, and I’m done pushing a rock uphill,” he said.
Adding he can take a hint, Ayer confessed he is ready to move on. “I love directing, I love my job, I love working with actors. There are great places and great partners out there to work with, and I just want to focus on being a great partner and making some good movies,” he continued.
Ayer believes his Suicide Squad is very good based on the constant positive feedback he’s gotten all these years.
“The thing that’s been difficult for me is that I made a great film. I made a great film. The people who have seen my cut have pretty much unanimously said that it’s one of the best comic book movies ever made. If someone who’s seen the cut wants to dispute that, then they can come talk to me,” he said.
Ayer had to keep this sentiment to himself since the film’s release in 2016 in the face of much backlash and criticism. “I was pilloried, pilloried, in the media again and again over it, and then pilloried again and again in the press launch of subsequent IPs, but I kept my mouth shut for years,” he explained.
“I learned that nature abhors a vacuum, and if you don’t tell your story, then somebody else will. It’s incredibly unjust, and I can’t point to a similar situation, ever. It’s mind blowing. It’s a scar, it’s a wound and it’s taken a lot out of me. It also took a lot of equity out of my career, unfairly,” he added.
Ayer also thinks the superhero genre has likewise lost some of its equity, but he believes that can be fixed by going back to its roots of noble and extraordinary people helping others. “A lot of superhero movies these days have been really jokey and really kind of silly,” he said to Screen Rant.
“I think we’ve got to go back to the roots where it was always stories about fixing the world, you know. It was always stories about outsiders that have always been rejected by society who, no matter what, have got good hearts and are going to try to fix things,” he continued.
Ayer says the best way to achieve this regression is for the next generation of filmmakers to take over. “I think there’s an amazing new generation of storytellers, there’s a lot of new tools out there,” Ayer remarked. “And, really, they just need permission to tell their stories.”