Under the still fairly new leadership of James Gunn and Peter Safran, Warner Bros.' DCU has gotten off to a bit of a bumpier than expected start. Things were going swimmingly in the summer of 2025, as Gunn’s Superman movie released to critical and audience acclaim, and even Peacemaker season two performed similarly well.
However, this summer, things were far from as cheery for DC Studios’ output, as the Craig Gillespie-directed would-be-blockbuster Supergirl well and truly flamed out at the box office. Fascinatingly, though, the interconnected comic book franchise has two big projects coming in the immediate future, though: the Lanterns HBO series and, even more notably, the Clayface horror movie.
What is Clayface about?
Clayface is a film that is extracting one of the dozens of iconic villains from Batman’s rogues gallery and giving him a full movie treatment of his own. With the new trailer just released, audiences have been given a fuller look at precisely what kind of film to expect from director James Watkins’ new film. And somewhat surprisingly, the film looks to provide the DCU with a full-tilt pivot into the horror genre.
The Clayface film started as a passion project for horror auteur Mike Flanagan, who has played no small part in some of the most genre-defining works of the past decade, from The Haunting of Hill House to Midnight Mass and beyond.
Flanagan’s script was actually something he had had on the backburner for years and simply saw a window of opportunity when James Gunn and Peter Safran opted to reboot the entire cinematic universe with their new DCU. With an entirely fresh continuity, Flanagan pitched his Clayface story, and before long, the film was officially moving forward.
However, since then, Flanagan has been noticeably absent from the actual movie. He wound up not directing it due to other commitments (he’s currently making multiple Stephen King series for Prime Video, like Carrie and The Dark Tower) and then news came that the script was actually getting a second pass from a completely separate writer, Hossein Amini.
This was especially odd, given that James Gunn had made a point of reiterating multiple times how important it was to DC Studios for any and all new projects to have finished scripts prior to production and how much he loved Flanagan’s script.
Some speculated that the rewrites could have been as simple as massaging the story into the DCU’s existing continuity, but even that is more complicated than expected. In addition to this mainline DCU, Matt Reeves’ The Batman universe also still exists as its own tangential thing—for now. While Reeves is actively working on The Batman Part II, he is also a producer on Clayface, which has led to further questions about where exactly this falls in the grand scheme of things.
Despite all of these ongoing questions regarding the film’s backstory and production, the marketing for Clayface, judging by the new trailer, is keen on leaning all the way into the horror elements and staying pretty far away from its more overt DC connections.
The trailer has much more in common with advertising for recent horror hits like Smile, Obsession, or even Backrooms than it does with Supergirl, which is no doubt by design. At a moment where interest in superhero stories seems to be hitting new lows, interest in original horror films is at an all-time high.
The Clayface trailer shows that DC is aware of this and is intent on selling the film not based on its Batman connections but rather based on its own distinct horror bona fides.
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