Let’s be honest: the DCU has been one of the most fascinating, chaotic experiments in modern movie history, and right now Warner Bros. is trying to make lightning strike twice in a row. Lanterns just wrapped up its run on HBO Max, and by all accounts, it was a smash hit. It gave the DCU a much-needed win and generated real excitement for where this shared universe is heading. Now the studio is hoping to keep that momentum going with something far more unexpected: Clayface. On paper, this is a strange choice. Clayface isn’t a household name. He’s not Superman or Batman. He’s a shapeshifting, monstrous deep cut, a Batman villain that even some comic book fans only vaguely remember. But that’s exactly why this project is so interesting. The movie is being positioned as a low-ish budget horror picture, and horror is a genre that has a habit of turning the most unlikely candidates into massive hits. It doesn’t need to appeal to everyone. It just needs to find an audience that wants to be creeped out. And there’s an extra layer of intrigue here: many comic book movie fans know who Clayface is, and they’re desperate to see how he connects to the larger DCU. There are already hopes that the film will reveal Batman for the first time in this new universe. That’s a huge deal. You can make a small, contained horror movie, but if you drop a Batman connection in there, suddenly everyone cares. It’s a smart play, and it makes Clayface feel a lot bigger than its budget.
The first real sign that Warner Bros. believes in this movie came over the weekend, when Clayface held a series of early screenings. By Sunday night, the internet was already buzzing. Photos from inside the screening rooms started popping up, and people who had actually seen the movie were sharing their thoughts. But the most telling detail is the review embargo. The social media review embargo lifts tomorrow, Tuesday, October 13. That is incredibly early. Studios usually hold review embargoes until the very last possible moment when they’re nervous about what critics are going to say. They want to minimize the damage from bad reviews, or at least let opening weekend ticket sales happen before word gets out. When a studio lifts the embargo early, it’s a sign that they’re confident. They believe the movie is good, and they want people to talk about it. Compare that to Other Mommy, which came out this past weekend and reportedly has a 17% Rotten Tomatoes score. That movie was not screened for critics in the same way. The studio knew what they had, and they tried to hide it. Clayface is doing the exact opposite. Early impressions from the screenings have been largely positive, with people praising the tone, the horror elements, and the emotional depth of the story. There are, of course, naysayers already, but the fact that the embargo is lifting this early tells you a lot. It tells you that the people in charge are not scared. It tells you they think they have a hit. And after a string of comic book movies that have been hit-or-miss, that confidence is refreshing.
Of course, no movie screening in 2025 is complete without a wave of fake reactions and internet nonsense. Alongside the genuine positive impressions, a bunch of so-called anti-fans have started circulating photos with captions full of hate. They claim to have seen Clayface, and they’re desperate to tell everyone that it’s terrible. Some of them are even sharing alleged spoilers, including details about the ending. It sounds scary, until you actually look at what they’re posting. Most of them are using the exact same photo that someone else took inside the screening room. They’ve stolen a screenshot, attached a negative caption, and pretended they were there. It’s not subtle. We’ve seen this before with other movies, and social media misinformation has only gotten worse over time. AI has made it even harder to tell what’s real and what’s fake, though I haven’t seen any AI-generated fake leaks for Clayface yet. Give it a few days. The easiest way to spot these fake reactions is to check the account timelines. A huge number of these accounts are devoted to lambasting James Gunn and the entire DCU. They’re not interested in honest critique. They’re interested in tearing down anything that doesn’t fit their preferred version of the DC universe. That doesn’t mean every piece of criticism is fake. There are legitimate concerns about any film. But when you see a sudden flood of negative “leaks” from accounts using stolen photos, you should probably take a step back and ask what’s actually happening. The answer is usually that a coordinated group of online haters is trying to poison the well before the movie even has a chance.
Another rumor making the rounds is that Clayface’s early ticket sales are tracking much lower than Supergirl’s pre-sales at the same point in time. That sounds bad, if it’s true. But let’s look at the context, because context is everything. First, Supergirl was always a tentpole blockbuster. It had a massive budget, huge expectations, and a built-in audience that was going to buy tickets weeks in advance. Clayface is a low-ish budget horror movie. It was never going to have the same pre-sales curve. Comparing the two is apples to oranges. Second, Supergirl’s ticket sales reportedly collapsed once middling reviews started coming out. That’s a sign that big pre-sales don’t necessarily mean a movie is good. They can mean the marketing was effective. The opposite can happen with Clayface. It might have lower early sales, but if the reviews are strong and word of mouth is good, it could build momentum in a way that a tentpole can’t. People don’t need to pre-order tickets to a horror movie. They just need to decide on Friday night that they want to be scared. Third, look at the release date. Clayface opens on October 23, and it has almost no competition. The other new releases that weekend include Klara and the Sun, You Can See Everything, and Wildwood, which is a stop-motion animated film with amazing reviews but terrible box office tracking. That’s not exactly a murderer’s row. A movie like Clayface could easily dominate the weekend by default, especially if it gets good reviews.
The biggest factor in Clayface’s favor, though, is timing. This is a horror movie releasing one week before Halloween. That’s a massive advantage. You don’t need to know anything about Batman to show up for a scary, atmospheric monster movie in late October. You just need to be in the mood for something spooky. And right now, horror is absolutely thriving at the box office. Even bad horror movies are doing big numbers this month. Look at Other Mommy, which had terrible reviews but still managed to draw a crowd because audiences wanted to be scared. Clayface has the added benefit of being tied to a comic book universe, but it doesn’t need to rely on that. It can appeal to horror fans, to comic fans, and to curious moviegoers all at once. If it’s even half as good as the early reactions suggest, it could put up numbers that far exceed expectations. I’ll be the first to admit that I didn’t see this coming. When Clayface was announced, I thought it was a weird, maybe even unnecessary, addition to the DCU. It felt like a risk, and not the good kind. But the more I think about it, the more I believe it’s exactly the kind of risk that pays off. It’s not trying to be a four-quadrant, must-see-event blockbuster. It’s a character-driven horror film with a recognizable comic book villain at its center, and it’s coming out at the perfect time. I think the conventional wisdom is going to be proven wrong here, and I’m looking forward to watching it happen.
All of this means you should take the over-the-top hate with a massive grain of salt. The DCU has a loud, dedicated army of always-online haters, and many of them are still Zack Snyder devotees who miss the old DCEU. They want Snyder to come back. They want James Gunn gone. And they will attack anything associated with the new universe, regardless of whether it’s actually good. That doesn’t mean the DCU is above criticism. Some projects have been disappointing, and honest critique is absolutely necessary. But there’s a difference between legitimate criticism and coordinated, fake outrage. If you see someone screaming that Clayface is a disaster before the review embargo even lifts, check the source. Check whether they actually attended a screening or just stole a photo from someone who did. Check whether their entire timeline is just a long series of anti-Gunn, anti-DCU posts. And then wait. The embargo lifts tomorrow, and we’ll finally get a real sense of what this movie is. If it’s as good as the early screenings suggest, all this noise is going to look very silly in hindsight. Clayface might not be the DCU’s biggest hit. It might not even be its most important movie. But it has a real shot at being its most interesting one. It’s a strange, ambitious, low-budget horror experiment in a universe that’s still figuring out what it wants to be. And sometimes those experiments are exactly what we need. If it works, we’ll all be talking about how we saw it coming — or at least pretending we did.