James Gunn's loud and lewd revamp, Suicide Squad from director David Ayer, Gunn's effort certainly went a long way towards redeeming the franchise. However, it was only thanks to the future DCU head honcho's commitment to his original vision that audiences got a real taste of what the eponymous antihero team could be, rather than another diluted compromise.
Although the two films share key characters and concepts, box office. Given The Suicide Squad's meager earnings, it's easy to see why executives were keen to tone down the movie's more gratuitous scenes.
How James Gunn's PG-13 The Suicide Squad Would Have Differed
From a tonal point of view, pursuing a PG-13 rating would have made for a wildly different The Suicide Squad movie. The combination of foul language and extreme violence helps make the existing movie one of the more adventurous entries in the DCEU, as well as allowing the franchise to bring many of its more colorful characters to the screen. Without an R-rating, for instance, it's very unlikely that audiences would have seen an authentic Nanaue or Peacemaker – both of whom are arguably defined by their violence. Equally, a loosening of restrictions also allowed one of the original Suicide Squad's break-out stars in Margot Robbie's Harley Quinn to fully commit to the character's darker tendencies in a way that hadn't been seen before.
The distinctly adults-only tone of the movie also allowed Gunn to fully embrace the original Suicide Squad's naturally anarchic tendencies as a group of villains, brought together only as a last resort. As Ayer's movie proved, making The Suicide Squad PG-13 would ultimately make it more difficult to differentiate what makes the titular team so unique. Ultimately, it's their willingness to go above and beyond with occasionally grotesque violence that makes the Suicide Squad such a useful asset to Waller. Ignoring this attribute not only makes the movie more by the numbers but also strips the protagonists of their individuality. Even though there are undoubted risks to pursuing a potentially exclusionary rating, using violence to make the Suicide Squad stand out is an undeniably effective way of establishing them as a force to be reckoned with.
How The PG-13 Rating Affected Ayer's Suicide Squad
The consequences of watering down one of DC's most interesting teams are on full display in Ayer's Suicide Squad. While Gunn's bold take on Task Force X used violence and bad language to differentiate itself from the sausage factory of interchangeable superhero movies, Suicide Squad took a potentially innovative concept and turned it into something derivative. Constrained by its PG-13 shackles, Ayer's antiheroes were no different from the punch-pulling, homogenous characters featured across multiple other DC and Marvel movies. As such, Ayer's Suicide Squad was unable to establish its protagonists as something unique – declaring them the "worst of the worst" without providing any justification for their status.
This sense of compromise was identified in a number of contemporary reviews. For example, Gunn's Suicide Squad sequel proves that they can nevertheless be effective tools.
Did Gunn's The Suicide Squad Truly Need To Be R-Rated
Given that the movie failed to make its budget back, there are genuine questions to be asked around whether The Suicide Squad shot itself in the foot by being so bold. However, the fact is that in order to truly realize Gunn's vision, the R-rating probably was necessary. Not only did Gunn have complete freedom to create a cast of characters that were as unique as they were extreme, but opting for a wildly different tone also allowed the film to stand apart from Ayer's anemic earlier effort. While a PG-13 The Suicide Squad could still have worked, there's a very real risk that it would have become a rehash of Gunn's Marvel hit Guardians of the Galaxy, which also offers a quirky take on idiosyncratic characters – just in a more restrained way. By going down a different route, The Suicide Squad became a completely original and much more interesting movie. Had Gunn tried to shoehorn some of his more elaborate ideas into a PG-13 template, there's a very real danger that it would have been just as uninventive as Ayer's original movie.
