‘Clayface’ Wins the Box Office With a Rare A- CinemaScore: What Its $23M+ Opening Means
Gotham's ugliest new face just took the top spot at the box office. DC Studios' Clayface , an R-rated body horror movie about a disfigured actor who turns into living mud, earned about $9.5 million on its opening day (Thursday previews included), according to Friday figures reported by Deadline. That has it on track for a $23 million to $25 million domestic weekend from 3,458 theaters, enough to edge out Nathan Fielder's Elizabeth Holmes documentary You Can See Everything for No. 1.
The bigger headline might be the grade. Opening-night audiences gave Clayface an A- CinemaScore , a mark horror movies almost never get. Below, we break down the Friday numbers, how this stacks up against Smile , Black Phone 2 and DC's own recent misses, what critics and audiences are saying, and what a mid-budget monster hit could mean for the DCU and for horror.
Watch the Clayface trailer
DC Studios released the full trailer on July 22, three months after a teaser on April 22. If you haven't seen what this movie does to a human face, here it is.
The Friday numbers, step by step
Here's how the opening has played out so far, based on studio-reported figures relayed by trade outlets:
- Thursday previews: about $3.5 million, with shows starting at 2 p.m. That's well ahead of the $2 million Kraven the Hunter made from its previews in 2024.
- Opening day: roughly $9.5 million including those previews.
- Weekend projection: $23 million to $25 million domestic, up from Deadline's earlier $20 million to $25 million forecast.
- Overseas: Warner Bros. is expecting another $20 million to $25 million internationally this weekend, which would put the worldwide launch somewhere in the $40 million to $50 million range. The film started rolling out abroad on October 21.
- Budget: a reported $44 million before marketing, according to Deadline and Variety. Earlier reports had pegged it lower, between $30 million and $40 million.
The competition is no pushover. You Can See Everything expanded from 855 screens to 2,655 this weekend, made about $5.8 million on Friday and is heading for $19 million or more in its second frame. That would be higher than its $15.6 million opening, pushing its 10-day total to about $44.6 million. A documentary and a mud monster fighting for No. 1 in late October is a very 2026 sentence.
Official weekend estimates land Sunday morning, so the final number could still move a million or two either way depending on how front-loaded the fan turnout was.
That A- CinemaScore is a big deal
CinemaScore polls audiences on opening night, and horror fans are notoriously tough graders. The genre routinely lands in the B and C range even when movies make a fortune. Per reporting from Cosmic Book News and ComicBookMovie.com, Sinners remains the only recent horror release to earn a straight A, while Weapons and Obsession are among the few to score an A-. Clayface now sits in that club.
On the DC side, the grade ties James Gunn's 2025 Superman for the best in the new DCU, and it's a sharp turnaround from the B- that Supergirl drew in June. Gunn himself shared the result on Threads, crediting director James Watkins, writers Mike Flanagan and Hossein Amini, and stars Tom Rhys Harries and Naomi Ackie, and writing simply: "Really proud of this."
Verified ticket buyers on Rotten Tomatoes are just as warm, with the audience score sitting around 94% after debuting in the mid-90s. Critics are cooler: the movie is Certified Fresh at roughly 75% to 76%, which still makes it the second-best-reviewed DCU film after Superman.
What critics actually think
The reviews are a real split, and that tells you something about what kind of movie this is. On the positive end, The Hollywood Reporter singled it out as one of the year's surprises, Nerdist felt it kicks into a higher gear once Matt Hagen's powers drive the revenge plot, and Awards Radar called it a gory, hard-R ride with more hits than misses, according to a roundup of the early reviews.
The negatives cluster around the script. IndieWire saw it as an ambitious swing that didn't connect, Rolling Stone found it flat, RogerEbert.com felt it had more goo than substance, and Dread Central, one of horror's own outlets, thought its tone wobbled between body horror and something softer. ComicBookMovie.com's own two-and-a-half-star review praised Harries but argued the film plays more like a slightly better Morbius than a new The Fly , and noted it barely nods to Batman at all.
Put simply: critics were mixed, but the people who bought tickets mostly walked out happy. In horror, that second group usually decides how a movie holds.
Who's behind it
James Watkins, director
Watkins is a genre lifer. He wrote and directed the brutal British survival thriller Eden Lake (2008), directed Hammer's The Woman in Black (2012) with Daniel Radcliffe, and most recently wrote and directed Blumhouse's Speak No Evil remake (2024), which opened to $11.3 million. If Clayface lands where it's tracking, it will open roughly twice as big as his last film.
Mike Flanagan and Hossein Amini, writers
This is, in its bones, a Mike Flanagan project. He talked publicly about wanting to make a standalone Clayface film back in January 2021 and pitched it to Gunn and Peter Safran in March 2023. Flanagan has the story credit and shares screenplay credit with Hossein Amini ( Drive ), who took over rewrites in 2025 after Flanagan stepped away from the project. Flanagan, of course, is having a very good October: his Carrie series was just renewed for a second season at Prime Video.
The cast
Welsh actor Tom Rhys Harries plays Matt Hagen, a Gotham kid turned movie star whose face is destroyed by a crime boss. Harries is best known for Guy Ritchie's The Gentlemen , Netflix's White Lines , Apple TV+'s Suspicion and the Doctor Who episode "Dot and Bubble," so this is his first time carrying a studio movie. Naomi Ackie ( Blink Twice , Mickey 17 ) plays the scientist whose experimental treatment rebuilds him, Max Minghella plays a Gotham police detective, and Eddie Marsan and David Dencik round out the supporting cast. Volker Bertelmann, an Oscar winner for All Quiet on the Western Front , composed the score.
How it got here
DC Studios officially greenlit Clayface in December 2024 with a September 11, 2026 date. Watkins entered talks to direct in February 2025, Harries was cast that June, and cameras rolled in Liverpool on August 31, 2025, under the decoy title Corinthians. The shoot wrapped November 1. In February 2026, Warner Bros. slid the film six weeks to October 23, putting it right in the Halloween corridor, a move that looks smart this morning. (We previewed the release in our opening-week guide.)
By the numbers: how $23M-$25M compares
Context matters, because "$24 million" can read as a hit or a shrug depending on what you compare it to.
- Against October horror: It's right in line with Smile ($22.6 million opening in 2022) and just under Black Phone 2 ($26.5 million last October, per TheWrap). Both of those went on to be very profitable.
- Against Sony's villain spinoffs: Better than Kraven the Hunter ($11 million) and Madame Web ($15.3 million), below Morbius ($39 million), per Boxoffice Pro.
- Against DC: Well below Supergirl 's $37.1 million opening, but Supergirl reportedly cost about $170 million and finished near $126 million worldwide. Clayface cost roughly a quarter of that.
- Against the forecasts: Boxoffice Pro's long-range tracking had it at $23 million to $33 million, and its weekend preview said $25 million to $30 million. So this is the low-middle of expectations, not a miss.
Analysis: the DCU just found a cheaper way to win
Here's the math that matters. A movie that cost about $44 million and opens to roughly $45 million worldwide in its first few days, with an A- from audiences, is on a path to profit long before it leaves theaters. Good CinemaScores usually mean healthy second weekends, and Clayface has Halloween itself landing next Saturday, which should give it a second wind instead of the usual 60% horror nosedive.
Compare that to Supergirl , which opened bigger but, at its reported cost, had almost no way to get there. The lesson for Gunn and Safran is hard to miss: the DCU's healthiest swing this year might be the weird, contained, villain-led horror movie, not the cape-and-cosmos blockbuster. Think of what Joker did in 2019 for character-driven DC stories, or how Blumhouse built an empire on budgets in this range. Clayface sits right between those two models.
For horror, it's another sign that audiences will show up for genre movies wearing other labels. Sinners was a vampire movie dressed as a period musical drama; Clayface is a body horror movie dressed as a comic book film. Both scored with crowds. The risk is front-loading: superhero fans tend to rush out opening night, while horror crowds arrive in waves. Saturday's number will tell us which audience this really is.
It also helps that the movie didn't drown in the October crowd. As we argued in our recent opinion piece, the Halloween pileup has buried smaller horror titles this year. Clayface had the brand muscle to cut through, and the A- suggests it earned the attention once people sat down.
What we still don't know
- The final weekend number: Sunday estimates will confirm whether it lands closer to $23 million or $25 million, and Monday actuals will settle it.
- International legs: Early overseas markets reportedly opened below Supergirl , so the global total is the open question.
- The Halloween weekend hold: Next weekend's drop will show whether the A- turns into real legs.
- A future for Matt Hagen: Nobody at DC Studios has announced a sequel or a crossover. A strong run would make that conversation a lot easier.
The bottom line
Clayface isn't a monster-sized opening, but it's the right-sized one: No. 1 in America, an audience grade most horror movies can only dream about, and a budget small enough that the math already works. Critics may be split, but the people paying for tickets seem to have found exactly the gross-out DC movie they were promised. If it holds over Halloween, this could be the template for the DCU's next few villain stories.
Your turn: Did you see Clayface this weekend? Would you give it an A-, or is that grade way too generous? Tell us in the comments.
Related on The Horror Feed
Header image: original illustration created for The Horror Feed. Trailer: DC Studios / Warner Bros. Pictures via official YouTube. Box office figures are studio estimates and may change.
Sources: Deadline, Cosmic Book News (opening), Cosmic Book News (previews), Cosmic Book News (CinemaScore), ComicBookMovie.com, ComicBookMovie.com (reviews), Fiction Horizon, Get Your Comic On, Boxoffice Pro (weekend preview), Boxoffice Pro (long range), Awards Radar, TheWrap, Wikipedia (production history).
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