The saga of “Suicide Squad” is pretty familiar text at this point: Warner Bros. freaked after seeing the reviews for “Batman v Superman: Dawn Of Justice,” ordered reshoots, cut their own version of the movie, and eventually settled on a cut with director David Ayer, but it meant that a lot of material wound up getting snipped. Jared Leto has griped that there was so much of his Joker material left out, you could make a whole other movie out of it. However, Margot Robbie has a reasonable answer why the Joker scenes, many of which involved her character Harley Quinn, were ultimately excised.
Chatting with Tipsy Talk, she essentially says that there’s only so much room in a two-hour movie, and that while the Joker and Harley Quinn stuff was interesting background, it got in the way of the main narrative thrust.
“They probably realized that the emotional through-line of the story had to be the mission that we were on, and explaining the Enchantress’ position and all that kind of stuff,” Robbie said. “And the [Harley and Joker] backstory stuff, though it’s magic and some of the stuff we shot was insane, they are flashbacks…so there’s a lot, but it just didn’t make sense to confuse the present storyline to incorporate all that.”
Well, that’s probably the most level-headed thing said about “Suicide Squad” in the past week, and it makes a lot of sense. As for all the chatter about a Harley Quinn spinoff? “I’m trying to make that happen,” she said.
Whether or not this explanation satisfies we’ll have to see, but with no director’s cut coming, its bigger question is if this extra material will ever see the light of day. [EW]