The Batman villain who melts is now the man of the weekend — and the box office race is tighter than anyone expected. DC Studios' Clayface, the R-rated body horror film that opened Friday in 3,458 theaters, is tracking toward a $23 million to $25 million opening weekend after earning $9.5 million on Friday including $3.5 million in Thursday previews, per Deadline's Friday update. Audiences are responding: an A- CinemaScore — unusually high for horror — a 94% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes, and 4.5 stars on PostTrak. For a $44 million-budgeted film, that is a strong start. But the top spot is not locked, because the weekend's real story is the challenger nobody saw coming.
That challenger is A24's You Can See Everything, the Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim documentary about Elizabeth Holmes, which opened to $15.6 million from just 855 theaters last weekend — the largest launch for a nonmusical documentary in two decades — and expanded to roughly 2,600 theaters this weekend, tracking toward at least $18 million in its second frame. A documentary chasing down a DC movie for No. 1 is the kind of box office twist that makes the whole industry pay attention.
Step back and look at what Clayface actually is, because the gamble is the story. Directed by James Watkins from a screenplay by Mike Flanagan and Hossein Amini, produced by Matt Reeves, James Gunn, and Peter Safran, the film stars Tom Rhys Harries as Matt Hagen, an actor whose face is disfigured and who turns to a scientist, played by Naomi Ackie, for help — setting off a transformation drawn from the character's comic origins. No capes, no universe-building, no $200 million budget. Just body horror, identity, and transformation, made for $44 million before marketing. Early tracking had it anywhere from $15 million to $35 million; the final number is landing near the lower end of studio hopes but well clear of the pessimists, and an opening near $25 million would nearly cover the production budget in a single weekend.
The stakes for DC are real. Supergirl, the last DCU release, opened to $38 million domestically against a $170 million budget and finished around $126 million worldwide — a disappointment that put pressure on every DC swing after it. Clayface was designed to be the opposite bet: small, strange, and cheap enough that a modest opening is a win. The newly merged Paramount and Warner Bros. is also looking for a second straight weekend on top after Street Fighter opened to $31 million last weekend. And the film carries a personal note for DAOS — we were in the room for the exclusive early screening in New York, and our review is already live on the blog.
The DAOS take: Hollywood keeps asking whether superhero fatigue is real. Clayface answers with a different question — what if you stop making superhero movies and start making horror movies that happen to star a Batman villain? The previews beat Kraven the Hunter's $2 million and sit close to Birds of Prey's $4 million, the audience scores are elite, and the budget is so low that "disappointment" barely applies. Win or lose the weekend to a documentary, DC just proved the small swing works. The monster is loose, and the model might be too.
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Sources: Comic Basics · TheWrap · ComingSoon · Koimoi
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