Warning: spoilers for Suicide Squad are ahead!
For over a year, Suicide Squad advertised that it would be showing moviegoers Joker and Harley Quinn's relationship, something that hadn't been seen on the big screen before. While the movie did cover the basics of how they met and their bizarre chemistry, the final cut of the movie left out a lot of material that had been teased in the previews and photos. For fans of the clownish couple, this was likely a disappointment, but Harley's actress Margot Robbie believes these cuts were implemented so there was more focus on the eponymous team and their adversary, Enchantress.
While enjoying a drink on an episode of Tipsy Talk, Robbie speculated that when Suicide Squad was being edited, the crew realized that while the Joker/Harley flashbacks were interesting, there was perhaps too much focus on them and not enough on the current storyline, hence the change. She said:
They probably realized that the emotional through line of the story had to be the mission we were on, and kind of explaining The Enchantress's position and all of that kind of stuff. And the backstory stuff is like magic. Some of the stuff we shot is insane. They are flashbacks, and they're meant to be snippets, but I think when we were filming maybe we got too engrossed into flashbacks. Especially when you got Jared [Leto], he's going so deep with that character and we're all like going really, really deep. David [Ayer] goes really deep with the characters. Yeah, so there's a lot, but it didn't make sense to confuse the current and present storyline to incorporate all of that.
Suicide Squad managed to cover the main beats of Joker and Harley's past together, the Clown Prince of Crime manipulating Harleen Quinzel at Arkham Asylum to her falling into the vat of chemicals and him diving after her. However, the execution felt incomplete, as if pieces from the puzzle were missing. Harley wasn't as affected by this, as she still got her moments with Deadshot and the other Squad members. Joker, on the other end, got the raw end of the deal, because despite being marketed as one of the movie's main characters, only got about 10 minutes of total screen time. Obviously Suicide Squad was never meant to be his story, but with him not around that much, it was hard to get a good read on this version of the character. Ideally the home media release will include some, if not all, of these deleted scenes to give fans a more complete version of their past together.
Suicide Squad is currently playing in theaters, and while nothing is official yet, it's a good bet that this isn't the last we've seen of Joker and Harley Quinn in the DC Extended Universe.
