How a terrible movie disowned by its director ended up winning an Oscar
As a general rule of thumb, Oscar-winning movies come straight from the mind of their directors, with the most important ceremony on the awards season calendar rewarding the creativity, imagination, and ingenuity that goes into crafting a memorable motion picture.
Of course, that isn’t obligated to the case, and rarely has that been truer than Suicide Squad. The comic book adaptation was dragged over hot critical coals, lambasted by its target audience, criticised by several of its stars, and disowned by its director, and yet history will always remember it as an Academy Award-winning movie.
Known for his gritty, street-level crime dramas, David Ayer made the jump into blockbuster filmmaking when he was hired by Warner Bros and DC Films to craft an antihero ensemble flick that put the bad guys of superheroism at the forefront. It was a neat concept in practice that had the potential to act as the antithesis of the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s Guardians of the Galaxy until the hands of studio interference began to make themselves felt.
After the end of principal photography, Ayer became less and less integral to the project. The original editor, John Gilroy, departed and was replaced by studio-selected candidate Lee Smith, which led to a pair of different cuts being assembled. One was closer to the director’s original intentions, and the other was more light-hearted in tone. The one that fared better with test audiences would end up shaping the theatrical edition of Suicide Squad. Unfortunately, it wasn’t Ayer’s.
Suicide Squad may have earned an impressive $749million at the box office, but it wasn’t Ayer’s film, and he’s been happy to admit that in the years since. He described his cut as “methodical, layered, complex, beautiful, and sad,” only for Warner Bros to take over. “My soulful drama was beaten into a ‘comedy,'” he shared, which he blamed on how poor reviews for Batman v Superman “shellshocked the leadership” of the studio.
“Hollywood – I tell people – is like watching someone you love get fucked by someone you hate. The big one is Suicide Squad. That shit broke me. That handed me my ass,” he shared on Jon Bernthal’s Real Ones podcast. “Come right off Fury, right? I had the town in my hand – could’ve done anything, and I did do anything. And go on this journey with And the same thin – authentic, truthful, let’s do all the rehearsal, let’s really get in each other’s souls. Let’s create this amazing, collaborative thing, right? And then Deadpool opened.”
Ayer has made it unequivocally clear that Suicide Squad is not his movie in spirit, but any signs of his director’s cut being finished and released have appeared to dry up permanently. Still, it did win an Oscar for ‘Best Makeup and Hairstyling’, an unexpected footnote to a complicated story. Not an entirely undeserving one, either, seeing as it was top-notch in that department if very few others.
