DC Studios is in an interesting place at the moment. As their primary competition, Marvel Studios, is gearing up to release Avengers: Doomsday, a film that returns to the franchise to very familiar ground and brings back as many familiar faces as possible, DC Studios is actively diversifying its own slate of projects. Sure, there was the misfire of Supergirl over the summer, but such is the blessing of having a lot of irons on the fire: there’s always something else to pivot to. Right now, Lanterns is doing obscenely well, both commercially and critically, on HBO, and the studio is gearing up for the Halloween-timed release of its first-ever horror film, Clayface.
Much of the discourse surrounding Clayface up until this point has been questions of what exactly the movie is going to be. The marketing has portrayed it as a true-blue body horror film that just so happens to star a member of Batman’s rogues' gallery. Recently, it was revealed that the film is even going to be the first R-rated movie release from the DCU, hinting that it was indeed going to be a bona fide genre film. And now, star Tom Rhys Harries has confirmed in a recent interview that the titular monster is going to go full-blown monstrous form by the film’s end, saying simply, “It’s f-cking sick!”
This is notable given the company of villain-centric films that Clayface is entering into. The most apt comparisons to be made between Clayface and any other superhero-related films are the Spider-Man spinoffs produced by Sony, such as Venom, Morbius, Madame Web, and Kraven the Hunter. Each of these films took a villainous character who is often seen squaring off against one of the most popular comic book heroes of all time and instead extricated them to be the leads of their own films, devoid of that hero. Obviously, none of these worked out particularly well. The Venom movies have their defenders, I suppose, but Morbius, Madame Web, and Kraven served as both setup and punchline before their opening weekends were even complete. They netted abysmal reviews and lost huge chunks of money at the box office.
Notably, all of these films watered down these villains into bland and uninteresting characters that were no longer even particularly villainous. Kraven was a well-intentioned hunter squaring off against a Rhino terrorist, Madame Web was a woman who could sometimes see the future and save other people, and Morbius was just Jared Leto. So, the concern surrounding Clayface has long been that the film will fall more distinctly into that line of spinoff, wherein it's essentially Clayface in name only.
While the marketing for Clayface thus far has leaned into horror, it has shyed away from giving glimpses of the monstrous final form of the character, leading many to speculate that Clayface would just be a mushy dude for the whole movie. However, Tom Rhys Harries is putting such concerns to rest. While he stipulates that the goal is to continue not to reveal the final form in the marketing materials, he says that the movie will deliver the character’s final form and will be “f-cking sick.”
This is all good news, which indicates that Clayface will indeed be more like its body horror influences than it will be like Sony’s branch of villain spinoffs. Personally, I am jazzed to see what this team has cooked up here.
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