The Rising Star on the Horror Circuit

I legitimately didn’t have plans to write any kind of follow up to my Clayface review. It’s a good movie, and I think anyone that likes body horror, thrillers, or darker fantasy adventures will probably enjoy it. The film, though, is good enough that I didn’t really have any qualms with it, so there was no need for me to do my usual over analyzing to try and see how it could have been better, or how it needed to be saved (unlike Captain America: Brave New World). It also doesn’t have a ton of cross connections to the larger DC UniverseThe successor to WB's failed cinematic universe, the DCEU. Headed by James Gunn and Peter Safran, this new DC Universe carries over some continuity from the former film and TV series while crafting a new, rebooted universe for the future. (even though it’s set within it) so I didn’t have much need to do any kind of spoiler space discussion (unlike Spider-man: Brand New Day). It’s just a good movie that stands on its own. Full stop.

But online discourse has been building around this film, and the DCU in general, and there are a lot of voices out there saying that Clayface is an abject failure. Mostly it’s Snyderbros (or, even more realistically, bots pretending to be Snyderbros), but it still felt like addressing their comments was worthwhile because, at this point in Clayface’s life cycles, less than a week after the film has come out, anyone saying that the the film is an abject failure is lying through their teeth. Basic math states otherwise.

Let’s start with the basics. Original Clayface was reported to have a budget of $44 Mil, small by most metrics, although high for a tiny horror film. That was to be expected for anything that tied into a larger cinematic universe, and once you factor in special effects and CGI, $44 Mil feels honestly quite low. That budget, though, was the gross amount and, once tax incentives and other breaks were factored in, the total budget (net) for Clayface is actually lower, to the tune of $30 Mil. So really, not bad at all for a superhero-adjacent film.

This matters because a film has to make a certain amount at the Box Office to be considered a “success”. Any time you hear people throw around terms like a film was a “flop” or a “bomb”, that’s because the movie failed to make it past its break even point (flops are worse than bombs, though, with bombs really hurting their parent studios, resulting in massive losses). There’s a basic formula you can use to see how much a film needs to make, and generally it’s about two-point-five times its production budget to be in the clear.

This number comes from a set of fixed factors. For one, whatever a studio spends on production it’s also going to end up spending at least half again on advertising. Additionally, studios only get about half of the total ticket sales from films released in theaters, with the theaters taking the other (approximate) half. These are soft numbers, mind you, and how much a studio spends on advertising can go up and down, and they can also negotiate special deals with theaters that affect their split of the profits. That’s why two-point-five is normally used as it’s a strong, standard number that almost always applies. If a film makes that much over its budget, it’s in the black.

So, from a basic perspective, two-point-five times $30 Mil comes out to $75 Mil. That’s the number Clayface has to make to meet its budget, and anything over that is gravy. Right now, with the film out less than a week since its opening, it has already made $50.8 Mil. Small potatoes for a superhero film, most of which easily cross $100 Mil their opening weekend, but not bad for a small budget horror film at all.

And there are more factors that we can attribute to it at all, even if you want to call its opening performance “soft”. For starters. Matt Hagen (the titular Clayface) is not a well known character outside of BatmanOne of the longest running, consistently in-print superheroes ever (matched only by Superman and Wonder Woman), Batman has been a force in entertainment for nearly as long as there's been an entertainment industry. It only makes sense, then that he is also the most regularly adapted, and consistently successful, superhero to grace the Silver Screen. circles. Fans of the Bat know him, but many people don’t, even if they’re at least familiar with Batman. He’s a B-tier supervillain, at best, and this was a bold play for DC to make a film around a character like this. There’s also no discounting the fact that DC is still in a hole from their failed DCEU, and they’re having to fight to gain back audience members for their films. That, plus Supergirl failing in theaters earlier in the year shows that DC fans are still hemming and hawing about coming back for DC’s movies. In that context, Clayface’s performance isn’t bad, certainly. Not for a small budget film.

But $50.8 Mil isn’t the $75 Mil Clayface needs. Not yet. So how can we know the film is a success? Again, basic math. Film releases work on a Theatrical Window curve, with a heavy share of their money coming in up front (about fifty percent) with the rest slowly trickling in over the following weeks. Put another way, whatever a film makes in its first week, you can double that and expect it to make the rest over its full theatrical window. So if Clayface made $50.8 Mil its first week (before the second weekend’s showings) then we can expect it to make roughly $100 Mil across its life (give or take a few bucks). That is certainly more than $75 Mil.

And that doesn’t take into account further factors. For one, horror movies frequently have legs. Horror is a genre that works well with word of mouth, and horror films can get carried by audiences wanting to experience them again, see them in groups, get other people to see them. Two of the biggest horror movies this year were indies that weren’t necessarily expected to generate massive numbers, Obsession and Backrooms, and yet both of them way outperformed initial expectations. Clayface is a slightly different kind of film, but horror can grow legs that superhero films do not. There’s every chance Clayface could outperform a modest $100 Mil projection.

Of course it could also collapse after its first week, but even a poor projection says that even a flop is going to make at least twenty five percent of its first weekend gross on the back end which comes out to $75 Mil, right where Clayface needs to be to break even. So by all metrics, this film should be fine. Maybe it has legs and spawns a franchise, maybe it doesn’t, but the likelihood of a Morbius-level flop is incredibly low. DC didn’t spend that much on the film, and they don’t have to make all that much to be successful. By all accounts, their expectations for the film were well managed and fairly accurate.

As for what this means for the greater DCU, probably not all that much beyond the universe will keep on going. This wasn’t an automatic flop or bomb right out of the gate, and it isn’t going to smear egg all over DC’s face. If it grows legs, it could even be a nice little gem for the universe (although it’s too early to say whether that will happen or not). And its (small, yes) success also means that the gamble worked. The film did what it needed to and no one at Skydance (WB’s new owners) is going to question James Gunn for at least a few more months. They took a risk, it paid off fairly well, so there’s no need to rock the boat.

Factor that in with the solid theatrical success of Superman, and the streaming successes for Creature Commandos, Lanterns, and Peacemaker, and so far the DCU is well on track. One misfire, Supergirl, isn’t enough to sink the ship, so we’ll likely see this universe go on for another few movies and shows, well past Man of Tomorrow in 2027. And by then we’ll get more announcements of future projects, once the dust from the Skydance acquisition settles.

All things considered, Clayface did its job, and did it well. There is no need for doom and gloom at this juncture, no matter what the only trolls (and bots) may say.