SUICIDE SQUAD: When Making a Movie "For The Fans" Isn't Good Enough

When Deadpool came out earlier this year, I wrote about how things typically don't go very well when a studio or filmmakers claim they made a movie "for the fans." Deadpool was one of the rare examples when it actually worked out for everyone involved (fans included), but Warner Bros. and DC Films' Suicide Squad seems to be a textbook case of the opposite — these filmmakers are just using the old "we made it for the fans" statement as an excuse to shield themselves from bad reviews.

I've been thinking a lot about Suicide Squad since I saw it. Joey loved it, but if you've read any complaints about the film elsewhere online, there's a good chance they mirror my own. I'll sum my feelings up like this: I think the movie is a sloppy, poorly edited mess. (There was reportedly a lot of studio meddling behind the scenes, and though Ayer claims the final cut is 100% his, I don't buy it. Unlike Josh Trank, who had a public meltdown when 20th Century Fox released a compromised version of Fantastic Four, Ayer is savvy enough to avoid burning any bridges or brand himself as a "difficult" filmmaker to work with.) Regardless of whose fault it ended up being, Suicide Squad is an excellent example of why the increasingly common practice of giving a movie a release date before it has a script is a bad idea.

Most critics tend to agree. As I write this, the film currently has a 26% on Rotten Tomatoes, a website fans tried to shut down because they didn't like the fact that the movie was receiving bad reviews. The cast and director have hidden behind the guise of making the movie for the fans, predictably falling right in line with the established pattern of what's happened time and time again with movies like these. You probably recognize this chain of events by now: a high-profile movie comes out, gets bad reviews, and the filmmakers attempt to spin the situation into one in which movie critics either had it out for them from the start or aren't capable of liking the movie. Of course, they create a situation in which the fans — the pure, innocent fans, who, coincidentally, are the ones who might pay to see the movie over and over again — are the only ones who can appreciate what they've created.

It's a garbage argument. Suicide Squad is a niche comic book that didn't have much, if any, larger cultural recognition before the movie's first trailers came out. The amount of people buying Suicide Squad comics is so small, there's no way Warner Bros. would spend nearly $200 million making a movie just "for the fans." Only 23,425 issues of New Suicide Squad were sold to comic book stores in North America in May 2016, so assuming all of those were actually bought by consumers and all the people who bought those issues went to see the movie, that's just over $200,000. Let's be generous and say they all bring a date, so we can double that number. Warner Bros. is clearly trying to reach out and pull in a much larger crowd; as much as fans like to think properties are being adapted just for them, making movies on this scale is first and foremost a business decision.

Another trend that always happens when bad comic book movies come out is that a lot of fans will jump into comments sections and defend the movie using knowledge previously gained from reading the comics. It's all well and good that a character's motivation for doing something was more clear over a multi-issue arc than it was in the film adaptation of those events, but that doesn't mean anything when it comes to the movie's quality: a film has to be able to stand on its own and coherently deliver information that makes sense to an audience who has never read a single issue. Again, Deadpool did this well; Suicide Squad does not.

(Side note: If a movie has Captain Boomerang in it and you're the world's biggest Captain Boomerang fan, you don't automatically have to like that movie. It's OK to demand better for the things you love. The more people accept and try to defend incoherent movies, the lower the bar becomes for studios to meet when it comes to quality.)

This should all be common sense at this point, but I find myself seeing this same argument pop up again and again, and hopefully this will help those of you who love the Suicide Squad comic books and can't understand why people didn't like the movie try to see things from a slightly different perspective. Look: you like what you like. I'm not here to shout you down or tell you what your taste in movies should be. All I'm saying is that it's not good enough for a studio to only make a movie "for the fans." If that's truly all they were aiming for, great — Suicide Squad is a huge success. But we all know that's not the truth, so can filmmakers at least just be honest moving forward and stop hiding behind the same old argument? When it comes down to it, making this movie "for the fans" just wasn't good enough.