Clayface Took $3.5 Million Before the Weekend Even Started

Body horror does not usually get a Thursday night that looks like a superhero movie. Clayface just did.

Warner Bros. and DC counted more than $3.5 million in U.S. previews, Deadline said, for James Watkins’s R-rated origin of Matt Hagen. Tom Rhys Harries plays the baby-face actor who reaches for a career, kisses the wrong person at the party, and loses the face. Mike Flanagan and Hossein Amini wrote it. James Gunn and Peter Safran greenlit it off that script in late 2024. Net production cost is about $44 million before advertising, shot in the UK, an hour and 48 minutes. Domestic forecasts sit between $20 million and $30 million. Gold Derby’s board had it near $25 million at home and another $20 to $25 million overseas, from about 3,400 theaters.

The preview comps are the flattering ones. Kraven the Hunter did $2 million on the way to an $11 million opening. Digger managed $1.2 million in previews. Birds of Prey, a very different DC spinoff, did $4 million before a $33 million weekend. Clayface is closer to that second number than the first, which is how a $44 million monster movie starts to look like a plan.

Critics are split in the way that matters for a hold. Rotten Tomatoes sat certified fresh around 76 percent, ahead of The Flash, Supergirl, and Joker: Folie a Deux. Metacritic landed at 59, which is the mixed pile. A fresh tomato and a middling metascore is the classic shape of a movie people will argue about in the lobby.

The other film in that lobby is A24’s You Can See Everything, expanding hard after a $15 million limited open. Trackers have the Holmes documentary in the low twenties if the wider break works. Different movie, same adults. If both land where the sheets say, Paramount-Warner gets a back-to-back No. 1 after Street Fighter, and the documentary spends the weekend proving a three-hour nonfiction film can still elbow a Batman villain.