Spoilers Suicide Squad - Grading & Discussion

Meh, if the movie makes anywhere near BvS's box office nobody is really going to give a shit about the reviews.

 

Yeah, the notion that professional film critics aren't prepared to judge a trashy comic-book flick aimed at fourteen-year-olds is laughably puerile, and says a lot more about Kahless than he may realize.

 

Plus (and I'm not entirely convinced by this argument) it's been argued that as foreign box offices have risen there has been a move to further simply stories and remove dialogue to make films 'translate' better across languages and cultures.

 

Just curious, but if you have not actually seen the film, why did you grade it?

 

I did? Must have clicked on it earlier in error.

 

Yes and no. When you're trying to build a huge expanded universe that supports multiple films a year failing to release a single film that Rotten Tomatoes grades fresh is not good for long term prospects. We're not at the "reboot everything" phase yet, but WB has got to be worried. They need a hit both critically and commercially.

 

Tell that to Paramount, and their $1,104,054,072 box office for a movie that got 51% on Rotten Tomatoes.

I don't see Transformers getting scrapped.

 

The Transformers and Twilight movies were all trashed by critics and yet both IPs are multi-billion dollar franchises. Studios care about profits and maximizing them. Ghostbusters is sitting with a positive score on RT, but the film has barely made back it's production budget. It's going to flop, like so many other films this year. If SS kills it at the BO, no one is going to care that the critics disliked it.

 

The article on the problems behind the scenes seems very similar to last years Fantastic Four fiasco. Trank's original film may have bombed as well but at list it probably would have been a coherent movie. I also remember how the ending of Generations was changed to make Kirk's death scene more dramatic and in the end just came across as goofy. Can somebody name some specific instances when studio interference actually made a movie better?

 

Actually, I thought it was a coherent film . . . until the last 20 minutes or so.

The problem for me is I do not know whether these critics are really intelligent, if their reviews are based upon their own preferences (or prejudices), or whether they're being "paid" to either compliment a film or trash it.

That's why I think it's best to form one's own opinion and not completely depend upon others - even if they are professional movie critics.

I'd rather not approach films in that manner, thank you very much. It still smacks of others dictating one's choices in movies and I've been disappointed one way or the other too many times by film critics to allow them to dictate what I should and should not watch.

 

@ theenglish--

http://www.gamesradar.com/40-movies-made-better-by-studio-interference/

 

Frankly, DCU - in both movies and television - has been impressing me a lot more in the past few years than Marvel . . . whose qualities in films and television have been somewhat inconsistent - at least to me.


But apparently, a lot of people have decided to allow the film critics to dictate whether they're going to see the movie or not. How sad.

 

The big break happens when Reed abandons the team, but how many times does Sue's hair change before that?

Turtletrekker: Thanks for the link. I am going to look through them all, but the first two basically refer to casting changes and a single scene alteration that seems like it was worked out with the director. The Oz dream sequence idea was something that never appealed to me, but to each his own. And Dredd and Scream 4 were pretty dreadful IMO. I also thought Berman blamed the studio for wrecking the script to Insurrection?

Final Edit from me on that link: Most of those changes are not the same as we saw with FF and apparently SS. Most of the movies from that list that I've seen stink anyway. The only two decisions that seem to me to have substantially improved a movie are Alien and Casablanca. And Casablanca was famously written by many people anyway.

 

I'm not approaching film like that - I'm approaching time like that. Time is a bigger problem for me in this example than cost.

This Friday night I can either see a film that film critics say is mediocre at best or terrible at worst or I can have dinner at a restaurant that food critics say is excellent. I'm letting the critics decide how I'll spend my time not if I'll see the film - which I'll simply defer until it is streaming. All human activity represents opportunity cost and information (such as that provided by critics) helps us make decisions - which is not the same as "dictating one's choices".

 

It's not "dictating," it's advising. Most people like to weigh the opinions of others before making a decision. You might ask a friend for help picking out new shoes or deciding where to eat out, or ask how they dealt with a problem similar to one you're facing. I recently sought out the opinion of a fellow writer about what route to pursue in trying to sell a spec novel. Listening to other people's opinions doesn't require you to follow them, but that doesn't mean there's anything wrong with choosing to go along with them if you trust their judgment. Nobody's "dictating" anything; you're just weighing information and making a choice based on it. You might consider the critics' opinions and decide to see the movie anyway, if you're interested enough, or you might decide that the critical response is reason enough not to waste your effort, if you were on the fence to begin with. In either case, the decision is still yours; the reviews are just a factor you consider in making your decision.

 

Both Marvel and DC's TV offerings are inconsistent. Agents of Shield vs Jessica Jones/Daredevil or 'fluff' vs drama is no different to the rather lightweight Supergirl/Flash/Legends vs Constantine. Actually, I don't think DC has anything approaching the quality of Jones or Daredevil.

Cinemawise neither the Superman movie or BvS came anywhere near the better Marvel offerings, and I don't expect Suicide Squad to change that. It is, however, still early days for the DCU.

 

It's interesting to hear that there was so much trouble with coming up with a final cut of the movie. This was definitely one hell of a production, with all of Jared Leto's antics, the crazy stuff Ayers made the cast do, and now all this trouble in the editing.
I can't help but wonder if this story about the different cuts is in response to the reviews.
A lot of people seem to be comparing this to the last Fantastic Four movie, but it sounds like this at least wasn't that much of a disaster.
I wonder if we'll ever get to see Ayers original cut?

 

Since they released Snyder's extended cut of BvS I see no reason why we couldn't get a "definitive" cut of Suicide Squad.

 

I'm starting to worry about Wonder Woman at this point. It may be the DCEU's last chance to make a good impression. But what if WB panics again and forces changes on it? The trailer looked great, but so did the Suicide Squad trailers.

 

I would hope if (and this is just if, cause hey, I'm rooting for it too) Suicide Squad under performs WB would look at that as a reason not to interfere with Wonder Woman... I would hope.