Why Clayface Could Change the Future of DC Movies

Nobody at DC Studios was looking for a Clayface movie. That’s the point. When Clayface opens Oct. 23, it arrives as the strangest bet of the James Gunn and Peter Safran era: an R-rated, $40 million body-horror film about a B-list Batman villain, starring an actor most audiences have never seen, from a director best known for making people squirm. If it works, it rewrites what a DC movie is allowed to be. Here’s what we know ahead of release, no spoilers.

The pitch nobody asked for

The origin story of the movie is itself a little unlikely. According to Safran, speaking to The Associated Press, neither he nor Gunn went looking for a standalone Clayface film. Mike Flanagan walked in with the pitch, and it became a script by Flanagan and Hossein Amini. Safran’s line on it: “You always look for volunteers and not recruits.”

Both executives have horror in their bones. Gunn started his career in horror; Safran helped launch The Conjuring. So when they told reporters in early 2025 that Clayface was “an incredible body horror film” and “definitely R-rated,” they weren’t hedging. Safran also made clear the film sits inside the DCU rather than off to the side: “It was important that Clayface be part of the DCU.”

What the movie is

Director James Watkins (Speak No Evil, The Woman in Black) takes his cue from the two-part “Feat of Clay” episodes of Batman: The Animated Series. Rising movie star Matt Hagen (Tom Rhys Harries) is disfigured by a mob boss (Eddie Marsan) and falls out of Hollywood. After surgery after surgery fails, he turns to an experimental treatment from scientist Dr. Caitlyn Corr (Naomi Ackie) that uses an untested, clay-like living organism to rebuild his face. You can guess the general direction from the title; the official trailers, which we broke down earlier this month, show plenty without spoiling the turns.

Watkins keeps insisting the comics homework is optional. “A lot of people wouldn’t necessarily know who Clayface is, but they wouldn’t need to,” he told the AP. “It’s its own movie.” Max Minghella and David Dencik round out the main cast; our Clayface primer has the full cast and background.

Watkins’ approach: horror that gets under the skin

Watkins’ description of the film to The Hollywood Reporter at this week’s Los Angeles premiere was “a rollercoaster ride. It’s got a lot of horror, a lot of heart, and a lot of humor.” Producer Lynn Harris told THR the goal was to tell Matt Hagen’s story with empathy, “from a very, very grounded emotional place.”

That grounding runs through everything Watkins says about the film. His stated taste is for horror “when it’s most relatable, when it actually gets under the skin,” and he leaned on practical effects where he could, with CGI and visual effects used alongside them, per the AP. The lineage he’s working in is obvious even if nobody at WB says it out loud: Cronenberg’s The Fly, Raimi’s Darkman, the small club of films that put a transforming body at the center of a genre picture.

Tom Rhys Harries, under the prosthetics

Watkins told THR he “auditioned the hell out of” Harries, more than he’d ever auditioned anyone. The Welsh actor’s read on the role is less monster than romantic lead gone wrong. “I was approaching it the whole time like: Matt thinks he’s in a romantic comedy,” he told the AP. “The fulcrum of the whole thing is his relationship with Caitlyn Corr.”

Then there’s the clay. Harries told BBC Wales the prosthetics were uncomfortable and that the discomfort was useful: “There was a benefit to having it, because the character is in discomfort.” His summary of Matt Hagen is the best one-line pitch the movie has: “He’s an actor who happens to have lost one of his tools.” And to the AP: “Part of the joy was being surprised at what’s looking back at me in the mirror every day.”

Why this one matters more than its budget

Here’s where reporting ends and our read begins. Three things are confirmed. The film is R-rated. It cost about $40 million, a fraction of a typical superhero budget, per the AP. And it’s the third DCU feature, landing after Superman and, per the AP’s framing, after a Supergirl that disappointed at the box office, with Skydance’s takeover of Warner Bros. freshly closed and Gunn and Safran retained to run DC.

Safran isn’t pretending the stakes aren’t real. “If you look at the cumulative choices that we’ve made, I think it’s pretty clear we’re trying to do things differently,” he told the AP. “Not everything is going to work.”

Our interpretation: Clayface is a test of whether DC’s “filmmaker-first, any genre” idea survives contact with a cautious new parent company. A modestly budgeted R-rated horror film doesn’t need Superman numbers to justify itself; it needs to turn a profit and prove that the DC label can stretch. If it does, the door opens for more of the small, strange, director-driven projects DC Studios has been talking about since 2023. If it doesn’t, expect the next two years of DC to look a lot safer. Nothing in DC’s public statements commits the studio to a “horror slate,” so treat that framing, which you’ll see elsewhere this week, as a reading of the choices rather than an announced plan.

Gunn, for what it’s worth, has already answered the “who asked for this” crowd on Threads, as the AP noted: Hollywood, he wrote, isn’t a place where the only movies that get made are the ones the public votes for.

Release details

Clayface opens only in theaters on Oct. 23, 2026, per Warner Bros. It’s rated R. The review embargo hasn’t lifted as of this writing; first social reactions from the premiere are out, and we’ll have our own review after we’ve seen the film. For DC’s wider fall, see our NYCC 2026 DC roundup and the latest on The Batman Part II.

Sources

• AP: In a gamble for DC, ‘Clayface’ blends horror and superhero (Jake Coyle, Oct. 16, 2026)
• The Hollywood Reporter (via Yahoo): Watkins and Harries at the premiere (Oct. 16, 2026)
• BBC Wales (via AOL): Harries on the prosthetics (Oct. 17, 2026)
• SlashFilm: Safran and Gunn on Clayface’s R rating and DCU placement (Feb. 24, 2025)
• Warner Bros.: Clayface official page