Jena Malone Won’t Be a Part of Zack Snyder’s Sucker Punch Reshoots
The actress weighs in on Snyder’s plans for a reunion.
Jena Malone has always been a scene-stealer. The Hunger Games: Catching Fire actress delivers a potent mix of mayhem and pathos in so many of her roles, but it’s in her partnership with director Zack Snyder where Malone has turned in some of her most memorable work. The pair first collaborated in the 2011 film Sucker Punch, where Malone played Rocket, a rambunctious hero who teams up with Emily Browning’s Babydoll and Abbie Cornish’s Sweet Pea to escape imprisonment.
Despite Malone’s badassery, the film wasn’t well received, and it remains one of Snyder’s bigger cinematic frustrations. Sucker Punch represents Snyder’s first brush with studio meddling: conflicts with Warner Bros. forced Snyder to retool his ambitious, musical ending, and he had to restructure the film to accommodate a PG-13 rating. Though Sucker Punch got an extended cut years ago, it wasn’t quite enough for Snyder. He’s still working on a director’s cut that aligns more with his original vision, and has even been chatting with Warner Bros. about reshooting Sucker Punch’s ending with the original cast.
“I think it’s good [if] I can get those guys, Emily [Browning] and Abby [Cornish] and the crew back in,” Snyder told Inverse while promoting his latest film, Rebel Moon. “Some reshoots would be amazing.”
It would be quite the feat to arrange a Sucker Punch reunion after all these years. Whether Browning and Cornish would be down remains a mystery, but at least one cast member would rather sit things out.
Jena Malone has fond memories of her first film with Zack Snyder, but her Sucker Punch days are likely behind her.
Inverse caught up with Jena Malone at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival, where the actress weighed in on the possibility of a Sucker Punch reunion. “I mean, I’m older now, so it would be different,” Malone quipped. “I think [Snyder]’s got a scan of my body. He can just do it with CG, or AI, or whatever they’re using these days — I’m good.”
Malone has fond memories of her time on the Sucker Punch set, telling Screen Rant it was one of the “best film experiences” she’d ever had. “I had just never been asked to do so many cool things and then also have the belief instilled in me that I could do those things,” she said in 2022. “That was a very groundbreaking moment in my journey as an actor.”
That said, it seems that chapter is closed for Malone, but that doesn’t mean she and Snyder are done collaborating. Malone recently appeared in Rebel Moon as Harmada, a sinewy spider-alien with an affinity for kidnapping children. Malone has popped up in a handful of Snyder films since 2011, from Batman v Superman to Army of the Dead. Her days as Rocket may be behind her, which is certainly a blow to any Sucker Punch updates. But at least it’s nice to see how Malone’s partnership with Snyder has evolved over the years.
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