Clayface Faces a Box Office Fight With Nathan Fielder's Elizabeth Holmes Doc

Clayface opens in theaters Friday, and it might have to fight for first place. Box office tracking has the DC Studios horror movie opening between $25 million and $30 million this weekend (Boxoffice Pro). Its biggest competition is You Can See Everything, A24's documentary about Nathan Fielder living with Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes. The documentary opened to $15.6 million from just 855 screens last weekend. It expands to more than 2,500 screens on Friday, with a projected second weekend of $15 million to $20 million.

That's a strange matchup on paper. Fielder is best known for Nathan for You and HBO's The Rehearsal, and now his deadpan documentary is going head to head with a DC body horror movie.

The reviews are in, and they're solid without being spectacular. Clayface is sitting at 77% on Rotten Tomatoes, which makes it the second-lowest-rated DCU project so far, behind only Supergirl at 52% (Forbes). Superman sits at 83%, while Peacemaker and Creature Commandos are both at 93%. Audience scores should start coming in once Thursday night previews begin.

Why does Clayface's opening matter for the DCU?

Clayface is a hard-R body horror origin story, and it's the Batman villain's first solo movie, with no Batman in sight. James Watkins directed it from a script by Mike Flanagan and Hossein Amini. Tom Rhys Harries stars as Matt Hagen, alongside Naomi Ackie and Max Minghella (Wikipedia). Watkins made The Woman in Black and the 2024 remake of Speak No Evil, while Flanagan created The Haunting of Hill House and Midnight Mass for Netflix. The movie's reported budget sits somewhere in the $30 million to $40 million range, which is tiny by superhero standards (SuperHeroHype).

That smaller budget changes what counts as a win. Supergirl was tracking for $40 million to $55 million before it opened to $38 million. The next DCU movie with a release date is Man of Tomorrow on July 9, 2027, so Clayface is the last DCU release for a while.

My read is that a $25 million opening would be a solid result for a weird, R-rated horror movie that cost a fraction of what Superman did (and it's honestly great that a Nathan Fielder documentary is the thing standing in its way). For more on the movie itself and James Gunn's latest rumor-busting, our earlier story is right here.

More movie news is right here.

Header image is an official still from Clayface from DC Studios and Warner Bros. Pictures.