DC's Clayface just got its best marketing from another studio's horror flop
DC's body-horror gamble spent months being written off as a curiosity. Then Universal's big Halloween rival bombed with audiences, and Clayface's presales started climbing. Twelve days
DC's body-horror gamble spent months being written off as a curiosity. Then Universal's big Halloween rival bombed with audiences, and Clayface's presales started climbing.
Twelve days before Clayface reaches cinemas, its most useful bit of marketing has been made by a different studio. On 10 October 2026, box office tracker TheFlatLannister posted day-two presale numbers for the DC Studios film to r/boxoffice, and the expectations moved. The old $16–20 million opening range is now looking like the floor, with the thread settling on somewhere between the mid-$20 millions and the low $30 millions.
The timing is not a coincidence. The same weekend, Universal and Blumhouse's Other Mommy opened at number one with around $27.5 million and was promptly handed a D+ CinemaScore, the lowest grade the service has given since Megalopolis in September 2024. Jessica Chastain plays both a mother and her sinister double, the reviews praised her and very little else, and the Rotten Tomatoes score is hovering around 20%.
The rival that cleared the lane
Until last week, Other Mommy looked like the horror film that would eat October. The trailer did the heavy lifting, Universal held back press screenings, and the opening duly beat the studio's $20 million expectation. Then actual audiences saw it. A D+ usually means a steep second-weekend drop, and r/boxoffice was already pricing in a fall of around 75%.
That leaves a gap right before Halloween, and Clayface opens into it on 23 October. The regulars noticed at once:
"Other Mommy being terrible should help it a bit. They got lucky."
— one of the most-upvoted replies in the r/boxoffice presales thread
The tracker's comparisons are still modest, to be fair. They come from a limited sample of cinemas, and horror audiences famously buy tickets on the day. Here is where Clayface stands after day two:
- Supergirl: 76% behind DC's June release, which opened to $37.1 million.
- Resident Evil: 64% behind Zach Cregger's reboot, up from 66% after the first day.
- Evil Dead Burn: 119% ahead of the summer horror that opened to just $13.7 million.
None of that screams blockbuster. But a film budgeted at a reported $40 million does not need Supergirl money, and it is now pacing more than twice as fast as the last franchise horror to stumble.
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A villain film, not a superhero one
Clayface has never been sold as a cape film. James Watkins (Eden Lake, Speak No Evil) directs from a script by Mike Flanagan and Hossein Amini. Tom Rhys Harries plays Matt Hagen, a Gotham kid turned film star whose face is destroyed by a crime boss, and the R rating comes with "strong bloody violence, gore and nudity". James Gunn, who produces with Peter Safran, has been blunt about the genre since 2025:
"It's a complete horror film."
— James Gunn on CBS Mornings
That pitch made Clayface look like a cheeky side project when it was dated for 11 September. Moved to late October, it gets the Halloween crowd instead, with Street Fighter opening a week earlier and chasing a different audience altogether.
Reviews are the last hurdle
Other Mommy got away with a late embargo and a great trailer for one weekend. Clayface has no such cushion. "Clayface can't afford to even have middling reviews," reads one reply, and another puts the maths plainly: 90% on Rotten Tomatoes and it beats every projection, 40% and it's dead.
Universal kept critics away to win one weekend, and may have handed Warner Bros. the rest of October.
A rival tripped, the presales jumped, and the calendar is clear. All Clayface has to do now is be good. For a character whose whole act is pretending to be someone else, that is a novel brief.
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