Sony spent years turning Marvel villains into antiheroes — DC's Clayface is being praised for refusing
One of the first people to see it walked in expecting Venom and walked out happy to be wrong. Not everyone in the room agrees.
The social media embargo on Clayface lifted on 14 October, after a premiere on 13 October and a run of invited screenings. The first posts cover roughly what you would expect from DC's R-rated body horror: gore, practical effects, Tom Rhys Harries as Matt Hagen and an awful lot of capital letters. These are bloggers and online critics from invited screenings, not paying audiences, and not reviews either. The proper reviews land on 21 October.
Among the 19 reactions in The Hollywood Reporter's roundup, though, sits a strand nobody at Warner Bros. wrote into the marketing. A few of them are simply pleased that the villain is a villain.
"This definitely felt like a VILLAIN movie and not an anti-hero! Which makes it even better! I went in thinking it was going to be Venom and left excited it was a VILLAIN and dark movie!"
— The Daily Kryptonian, on X
Conor (@Conorville08) went further: "No more anti hero Bs, DC understands that tragic Villains can exist." Brandon Davis praised "some dark, true villain turns by the end". That is three posts out of 19, so call it a strand rather than a consensus. Most of the others are busy with the blood.
Venom, Morbius and Kraven went the other way
Only one of those posts names Venom, and none mentions Sony. The comparison with Sony's Spider-Man spin-offs is ours, but it is hard to miss. For most of a decade Sony took Marvel villains and filed them down into antiheroes: Venom bites the heads off bad guys, Morbius sticks to synthetic blood, Kraven hunts poachers. The results were mixed, to put it politely:
- Venom (2018–2024): three films, roughly $1.8 billion worldwide between them. The antihero formula sold tickets here, and nobody should call it a flop.
- Morbius (2022): under $170 million worldwide on a reported $75 million budget, plus a meme afterlife Sony never asked for.
- Kraven the Hunter (2024): about $62 million worldwide against a budget of more than $110 million.
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Our reading is that the antihero tag never sold Venom by itself; Tom Hardy arguing with a voice in his head did. Without that double act, Morbius and Kraven were left as villains with their teeth pulled, and audiences stayed home. A Batman villain allowed to do proper damage is a different pitch entirely.
Not everyone saw a pure villain
To be fair, the same roundup offers the opposite reading. Bill Bria praised Clayface as "a movie that works on its own first, all shared universe considerations secondary", and then filed it under a very different label:
"That it's also a well-written, beautifully acted body horror/mad science/antihero monster movie à la THE FLY and DARKMAN is the bloody cherry on top."
— Bill Bria, on X
That is not a daft comparison. The Fly and Darkman are both tragedies about men whose bodies turn on them, and the official synopsis has a Gotham street kid turned Hollywood star, disfigured by a crime boss and spiralling into revenge. Monster and victim at once, which is roughly what Conor meant by "tragic", only with a different conclusion. Shahbaz of The Movie Podcast was the coolest voice of the lot, calling it "an odd third entry for a DCU still finding its identity".
On r/movies, the scepticism was blunter: "I don't trust first reactions from influencers or whoever these people are." First reactions from invited screenings are rarely negative, which is worth remembering before anyone books a babysitter.
The stakes are clear enough. Clayface is the third film in James Gunn and Peter Safran's DCU, after Superman made $619 million and Supergirl managed just $126 million this summer. It cost a modest $40 million, so it does not need to be a hit on the scale of Superman to pay its way. It opens in UK and US cinemas on 23 October, two days after the reviews. If the critics agree with Bria, it is an antihero after all.
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