Suicide Squad writer/director David Ayer shared a new image of Jared Leto’s Joker from the elusive Ayer Cut.
“Jared killed it But no one knows,” Ayer tweeted to accompany a photo of a shirtless Leto in full Joker garb with a baseball bat across his shoulder.
Suicide Squad was released in 2016 and was swiftly panned by critics. Not long after, it was revealed that the version released by Warner Bros. was the product of studio interference, leading many fans to put out the call to #ReleaseTheAyerCut. While this proved successful in the case of Zack Snyder’s Justice League, however, it hasn’t had the same effect on Suicide Squad as of yet.
As for Joker, it’s long been established that much of Leto’s scenes were scrapped, with Ayer saying in May 2020 that his “heart breaks for Jared.” One of the famously cut scenes would have featured Task Force X squaring off with The Joker, as well as Joker leading an assault on Arkham Asylum.
While Ayer has slowly been revealing more details about Suicide Squad over the past several years, he delivered his boldest statement yet in July. “I put my life into Suicide Squad,” he wrote. “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… [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 3rd act resolution. A handful of people have seen it. If someone says they have seen it, they haven’t… I will no longer speak publicly on this matter.”
Those remarks came just one month before the release of The Suicide Squad, a soft reboot of Ayer’s film written and directed by James Gunn. There was little carryover from the previous film, save for the inclusion of characters like Harley Quinn, Captain Boomerang, Rick Flag and Amanda Waller.
