Clayface movie explained: who he is, the R rating, box office

A horror film about a Batman villain, made for roughly a fifth of what Superman cost, was the most watched movie in North America over its opening weekend. DC Studios’ Clayface opened to an estimated $24 million in the US and Canada from October 23 to 25, 2026, and about $43 million worldwide.

Quick answer: Clayface is an R-rated body horror film from DC Studios, directed by James Watkins and starring Tom Rhys Harries as Matt Hagen, an actor who is disfigured and then turned into a shape-shifting creature of clay. It is the third film in the new DC Universe (DCU). It opened at No. 1 in North America on a reported budget of $40 million to $44 million, and no streaming date has been announced.

The character is one of Batman’s oldest enemies, first drawn in 1940. This film tells his story as a horror movie set in Gotham City, and audiences who saw it on opening weekend gave it an “A-” CinemaScore, a high grade for horror, according to the Associated Press.

In this article

• What is the Clayface movie about?
• Who is Clayface in the comics?
• Where does Clayface fit in the DCU?
• Why is Clayface rated R?
• Is $24 million a good opening for Clayface?
• When will Clayface be on HBO Max?

What is the Clayface movie about?

Matt Hagen is a rising film star in Gotham. After a mob boss has his face cut up, he agrees to an experimental treatment to repair it. The treatment works, then keeps working: his flesh starts to soften and reshape itself, and the film follows him into revenge as his body stops being his own.

Harries, a Welsh actor, leads a cast that includes Naomi Ackie, Max Minghella, Eddie Marsan and David Dencik. Aaron Paul has an uncredited cameo.

The film took an unusual road to the screen. Mike Flanagan, the horror filmmaker behind Doctor Sleep and The Haunting of Hill House, pitched a standalone Clayface story to DC Studios, which approved it in December 2024. Scheduling kept Flanagan from directing. Watkins, who made the British horror film Eden Lake (2008) and the 2024 thriller Speak No Evil, was hired in early 2025, and Hossein Amini, who wrote Drive, rewrote the script. Flanagan said in June 2025 that Clayface was “not my movie,” while hoping it stayed true to the spirit of what he had written, Popverse reported.

Warner Bros. first dated the film for September 11, 2026, then moved it to October 23 to put it in cinemas for Halloween.

Who is Clayface in the comics?

Clayface is not one person. DC Comics has given the name to at least eight characters since 1940, and the film borrows from the two who matter most.

The first, Basil Karlo, was a fading horror actor. In his debut he could not change shape at all: he was a man in a mask, killing the cast of a remake of his old film, Dread Castle, because the studio had made it without him. Later writers gave Karlo the clay body and powers of his successors.

The second, Matt Hagen, made Clayface a monster. A treasure hunter, he fell into a pool of radioactive protoplasm in a cave and came out able to mold his body into any shape. The power wore off after about two days, so Hagen kept returning to the pool, a weakness that gave Batman a way to beat him.

• June 1940: Basil Karlo debuts in Detective Comics #40, created by Bill Finger and Bob Kane.
• December 1961: Matt Hagen becomes the second Clayface in Detective Comics #298, created by Finger and Sheldon Moldoff.
• 1978: Preston Payne, a scientist, becomes the third, created by Len Wein and Marshall Rogers. Reference sources differ on whether his first appearance was Detective Comics #477 or #478.
• July 1987: Sondra Fuller, later called Lady Clay, takes the name in The Outsiders #21.
• 1992: Batman: The Animated Series airs “Feat of Clay,” in which Hagen is an actor hooked on a face cream called Renuyu. Ron Perlman voices him.
• 2016: In DC’s Rebirth relaunch, Batman recruits Karlo for his own team in Detective Comics, one of the few stories to treat Clayface as a hero.

The new film’s Hagen is closer to the 1992 cartoon than to the 1961 comic. He is an actor, as Karlo was, and his transformation comes from a medical treatment rather than a cave. Den of Geek’s Rosie Knight noted the film’s nods to The Animated Series and to Gotham landmarks.

Where does Clayface fit in the DCU?

James Gunn and Peter Safran took over DC Studios at the end of 2022 and began a new, connected universe under the banner “Chapter One: Gods and Monsters.” Clayface is its third cinema release, after Superman in July 2025 and Supergirl in June 2026.

It is set in that DCU, not in director Matt Reeves’ separate world of The Batman and HBO’s The Penguin. When the casting was announced in June 2025, Gunn wrote that after “a long and incredibly exhaustive search” DC had found “our DCU Clayface in Tom Rhys Harries,” Comics Beat reported.

There is a wrinkle. Clayface already appeared in the DCU in the animated series Creature Commandos, voiced by Alan Tudyk. Tudyk also voices Clayface in the adult cartoon Harley Quinn. DC Studios has not said whether his DCU version and Harries’ Matt Hagen are the same man, and with eight Clayfaces in the comics, either answer would fit.

The next DCU film is Man of Tomorrow, the Superman sequel, due in cinemas on July 9, 2027, according to TheWrap.

Why is Clayface rated R?

The Motion Picture Association rated Clayface R, meaning under-17s in the US need a parent or adult guardian with them. The rating is listed by The Numbers as being for strong bloody violence, gore, language, some nudity and brief drug use.

That is a deliberate choice. Superman, rated PG-13, was made for the widest possible audience. Clayface was made, in TheWrap’s description, on the kind of budget New Line would give a horror film.

Critics who saw it mostly agree on what kind of film it is. They split on whether it works.

Matt Konopka of the horror site Dread Central compared it to David Cronenberg’s The Fly, praised the half-melted faces and gooey practical makeup enhanced with computer effects, and noted that most of the killings happen off screen. He called it “a muddied and scare-less (though entertaining) adaptation” and gave it three out of five.

Knight at Den of Geek gave it four out of five and called it a horror triumph, comparing its extreme gore to Watkins’ Eden Lake and its tragic love story to The Phantom of the Opera.

On Rotten Tomatoes, about three quarters of critics’ reviews were positive, and on Metacritic it scored 59 out of 100, a “mixed or average” rating, by October 25. Harries’ performance drew the most consistent praise; the script and the uneven tone drew most of the criticism.

Is $24 million a good opening for Clayface?

For a superhero film, $24 million is small. For a $40 million horror film, it is a solid start, and the budget is the number that matters here.

Film	Released	Production budget	Opening weekend (US and Canada)	Worldwide
Superman	July 11, 2025	$225 million	$125 million	about $618 million
Supergirl	June 26, 2026	$170 million	about $37 million	about $126 million
Clayface	October 23, 2026	$40 million to $44 million	$24 million (estimate)	about $43 million after opening weekend

Source: The Numbers, Associated Press, TheWrap, Box Office Mojo, October 25, 2026. Budgets are as reported and exclude marketing.

Clayface earned about $19 million outside North America, the AP reported, and The Numbers listed its worldwide total at $46.5 million on October 25. Boxoffice Pro had forecast an opening of $25 million to $30 million in North America, so it landed just under that range. All weekend figures are studio estimates and are revised on Monday.

It beat a strong field. A24’s Elizabeth Holmes documentary You Can See Everything earned $19.5 million in its second weekend, up from its first, and Laika’s stop-motion film Wildwood, the studio’s first PG-13 release, opened third with about $11.6 million, according to Box Office Mojo.

Supergirl is the reason the small number looks good. It took about $126 million worldwide against a $170 million budget, a loss before marketing is counted. Clayface’s worldwide gross already passes its reported production budget after one weekend, although cinemas keep a large share of ticket sales and marketing is not counted.

The timing helps too. TheWrap expects the film to hold well over Halloween weekend, October 30 to November 1, and into November. Paul Dergarabedian, senior media analyst at Comscore, told the AP: “Clayface is a great example of studios taking chances.”

There is a business story under the box office. Clayface is the first Warner Bros. film released since Paramount Skydance completed its takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery on October 6, 2026, and TheWrap reported that no Warner Bros. film had passed $250 million worldwide in 2026. Clayface is unlikely to change that. Its value to the new owners is the margin, and the proof that a cheaper, stranger DC film can find an audience.

When will Clayface be on HBO Max?

Warner Bros. has not announced a date for Clayface on HBO Max, or for digital rental and purchase. For now it is only in cinemas.

Watch for: Under a court-approved settlement tied to the Paramount and Warner Bros. merger, films that count toward the combined company’s release quota must stay in cinemas for at least 45 days and off subscription streaming for at least 90. If Clayface is covered, that puts digital rental no earlier than about December 7, 2026, and HBO Max no earlier than about January 21, 2027. Warner Bros. has not confirmed either date.

Our explainer on how release windows work has the rules each studio follows and the averages behind them. Warner Bros. films have usually come to digital stores first and to HBO Max a few months after their cinema release.

Two things will tell you how DC Studios reads this result. The first is the second-weekend drop: horror films often lose more than half their audience in week two, so a fall under 50 percent over Halloween would be a strong hold. The second is what DC Studios announces next. A profitable R-rated horror film gives Gunn and Safran a model they can repeat with other villains from Gotham.