‘Clayface’ Wins The Weekend At A Projected $23–25 Million — DC’s Lowest Debut Yet

Clayface, the R-rated body-horror film from DC Studios and Warner Bros., is projected to finish its first weekend at No. 1 with an estimated $23 million to $25 million in domestic ticket sales, according to Deadline. The estimates, compiled on Saturday, would make the opening the smallest yet for the DC Universe, the franchise relaunched under studio chiefs James Gunn and Peter Safran. Final figures are due Monday; every number reported for this weekend so far is an estimate.

The trades do not agree on the size of the first day. Deadline put the opening day at $9.5 million, a figure that includes $3.5 million from Thursday preview screenings. Variety counted a $10.4 million opening day. Both reports agree on the shape of the weekend: a Friday strong enough to hold first place, in 3,458 theaters, ahead of the second weekend of A24’s Elizabeth Holmes documentary You Can See Everything, which expanded to about 2,600 theaters and is projected at roughly $19 million to $20 million for the weekend, with a domestic total of $31.7 million through Friday, according to Variety.

The film is directed by James Watkins and written by Mike Flanagan and Hossein Amini. Tom Rhys Harries stars as Matt Hagen, a rising actor whose face is disfigured in an attack; Hagen turns to scientist Dr. Caitlyn Corr, played by Naomi Ackie, whose experimental treatment leaves his body soft, malleable and able to change shape. The character is one of Batman’s oldest villains and had already appeared in animated form in Creature Commandos, the series that opened the DC Universe slate. No Batman appears in the film; the story is Hagen’s.

The comparison the opening will be measured against is Supergirl, released June 26. That film opened at $37.1 million on a reported production budget of $170 million or more and finished its worldwide run at $126.4 million, a result the trades recorded as a loss. Clayface was made for a reported $44 million, less than a third of Supergirl’s budget, and its projected debut trails Supergirl’s by more than $10 million while costing far less to produce. Going into the weekend, tracking had pointed to an opening between $25 million and $30 million; Friday-morning projections ran as high as $35 million before narrowing as the first numbers came in, according to Deadline’s reporting.

Audiences leaving the film on opening night graded it higher than horror films are usually graded. Clayface received an A− from CinemaScore, which polls opening-night audiences, and 4.5 stars on PostTrak. Variety’s figures gave it a 76 percent critics’ score and a 94 percent audience score on Rotten Tomatoes. Gunn noted the grade on Threads: “Sinners is the only horror movie to have EVER gotten an A Cinemascore,” he wrote, counting Obsession and Weapons as the other recent horror releases to reach A−. In The Hollywood Reporter, critic Frank Scheck called the film “a big swing that definitely pays off.”

Clayface is the third film in the DC Universe, after Superman in 2025 and Supergirl this summer, and the first to carry an R rating and a horror label rather than a superhero one. It added an estimated $4.3 million overseas on its opening day, according to Variety. Whether a $23 million to $25 million opening on a $44 million budget is the start of a profitable run depends on the same thing the estimates cannot yet show: how far the second weekend falls, a number that arrives next Saturday.

Sources: Deadline; Variety; Screen Rant; iHorror; The Hollywood Reporter; CinemaScore.