In 2022, Warner Bros. DC Studios announced it would be hiring James Gunn (Director of Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 1-3, The Suicide Squad) and Peter Safran as the co-CEOs of DC Studios. This move excited a lot of fans of the superhero or comic book movie genre, because Gunn had risen to prominence after his first foray into the Marvel Cinematic Universe with Guardians of the Galaxy in 2014. It wasn’t until 2025 with Superman that the newly formed DCU finally launched into the theaters. Superman was a critical success, a phenomenal film, and didn’t do terribly at the box office for an IP that had seen diminishing returns in recent decades.
Unfortunately for DC Studios, their next foray into the superhero genre, Supergirl (2026) turned out to be a colossal box office bomb and lost the studio over a hundred million dollars. The DCU followed up Supergirl this summer with a resounding success in HBO Max’s Lanterns series, which was one of the top 5 most streamed TV shows in the platform’s long history.
It is against this backdrop that Clayface (2026) hit theaters this past weekend. When James Gunn infamously made his “phase 1 slate” announcement for DC Studios in 2023, he specifically stated what DC Studios wanted to do was unique and distinct from other comic book movie studios (Marvel). They wanted to create an inter-connected universe with a variety of genres and themes. Hence, you would have more traditional superhero flicks like Superman (2025) alongside a True Detective style TV show like Lanterns (2026). The biggest selling point Gunn had at the time for this distinctive element of the DCU was the announcement of a “Clayface” movie—bringing the Batman villain’s origin story to the silver screen for the first time in a body horror, rated-R feature length film.
Gunn was ambitious when he decided to make his new universe’s third feature film centered around a B-list villain from Batman’s Rogues Gallery. However, the promise was there. If they could pull it off, this would be a definitive win for DC Studios and potentially be an in-road to draw more accomplished, creative directors to the studio knowing they would have the ability to tell their stories, and not have creative restraints on their projects.
If you looked online at the early reactions, Clayface is receiving positive reactions. It is currently at 76% critic score on Rotten Tomatoes, a 7.6/10 on IMDb, and has a 94% audience score with an A- cinema score. Unfortunately, when I went and saw the film last night, I quickly realized I must have seen a different movie.
I am actually quite shocked at how well Clayface is doing. It has a string-cheese plot, an identity crisis, abysmal CGI, and as Chris Ryan on the “Big Pic Pod” said in his assessment of the film “feels like the showrunners of (Amazon’s) Reacher series tried to direct The Fly”. There is little to recommend about this project. It refused to choose a theme, a key idea, or serve as a meditation on anything. Was it a commentary on the folly of looksmaxxing culture? Not really. Was it a meditation on the vanity of celebrity and influencer culture? No. Did it have anything profound to say about how trauma can turn us into either a hero or a monster? No. Did it have anything to say about the cosmetic industry and the folly of science as religion? No. Even though it added AI as a fundamental part of its plot, did it attempt to tackle that subject with any nuance? No.
As straight up entertainment, it fails as well. I am not a “horror” guy, but I know the best “horror” movies make your skin crawl and give you heart-attack inducing jump scares. This did neither.
In sincerity, if you are a “body-horror” fanatic, then maybe you should go see this in theaters. If you are a superhero completionist, maybe you should go see this in theaters. If neither applies to you, there are so many other options for you to spend your money on: Wildwood, You Can See Everything, and more. I’d skip out on this one.
The mark of a movie being labeled “poor” for me is: How often do I cringe or verbally say, “are we really doing this?” at the decisions a movie makes? This movie had (at a minimum) ten of those moments, and since it is a movie with AI driving a central plot point, I am giving “ChatGPT-face” a 4/10.
'Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3' Review
In a franchise full of production woes and meddling studio executives the Guardians of the Galaxy franchise has been a breath of fresh air, with the second installment not only being one of the best films in the Marvel Cinematic Universe but also one of the few films not constrained to the ongoing “Infinity Saga” and the most able to tell it’s own, self…
