ORIGINAL STORY BELOW
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By now it’s no secret that Warner Bros. and their DC Films division have been shaking up their formula post-BATMAN V SUPERMAN: DAWN OF JUSTICE. One of the first real ways we learned about this were the reports of their next DC flick, SUICIDE SQUAD, getting a bit of a facelift via reshoots. While we’ll never know, for certain, what the exact purpose of the reshoots were, we were told that the film’s third act was getting reworked with a new action sequence.
We now know the official running time for SUICIDE SQUAD, and even with the added sequence, the film clocks in at a lean 1:40. That running time comes according to Flixster, and it implies that director David Ayer has constructed a lean, mean movie. This stands in stark contrast to BvS, which came in at 2:31- and that was after some rather severe editing to chop it down from three hours.
Can you imagine what the running time would’ve been without the additional sequence(s)?
Despite the fact that SUICIDE SQUAD was never going to be as sprawling and ambitious as BATMAN V SUPERMAN, you might have expected a film with so many well-known DC characters- including The Joker, Harley Quinn, Deadshot, Amanda Waller, Lex Luthor, and Batman– to possibly go north of two hours. In this day and age, that would hardly have been unprecedented.
But it looks like Ayer ran a tight ship, kept the story and its characters tight, and wants SUICIDE SQUAD to be more of an adrenaline-fueled romp than some sort of ensemble epic.