Clayface Box Office: Needs $620M To Beat Superman

Early tracking puts James Watkins' DCU horror outing nowhere near the mark Superman set this year, with its opening weekend projected at a fraction of that film's haul.

Clayface opens October 23, and the number it has to chase is $620 million. That's what James Gunn's Superman pulled in worldwide earlier this year, per Box Office Mojo, and it's currently the benchmark for the rebooted DCU. Early estimates suggest Clayface won't come close.

According to Koimoi, the film is tracking for a North American opening between $23 million and $33 million, with a global debut somewhere around $50 million to $55 million. Compare that to Superman's $125 million domestic opening on its way to a $618.7 million worldwide run against a $225 million budget. The gap isn't small.

This matters because Clayface is only the third theatrical title under the DCU banner that James Gunn and Peter Safran have been building since Superman landed in 2025. The second, Supergirl, didn't work at the box office. So there's a real question sitting underneath the tracking numbers: is this universe actually building momentum, or is Superman starting to look like a one-off?

Gunn directed Superman himself, which mattered going in. He came off Guardians of the Galaxy goodwill at Marvel, and that bought him some patience when he cast David Corenswet as Kal-El instead of bringing Henry Cavill back, a decision that drew real backlash online before the film even released. The backlash died down once the numbers came in. Superman became a hit, and for a while it looked like proof that Gunn's version of this universe could work without leaning on nostalgia.

Clayface is a different kind of bet. It's a horror movie built around a Batman villain, directed by James Watkins, and it follows Matt Hagen, a movie star disfigured and then enrolled in an experimental treatment that turns him, slowly and then not so slowly, into living clay. It's a stranger premise than Superman's, and stranger premises don't usually open the way origin stories do.

The studio isn't necessarily chasing Superman's ceiling with this one anyway. A horror-adjacent villain film was never going to pull the four-quadrant crowd a Superman tentpole does, and nobody at Warner Bros. Is likely pretending otherwise. The $620 million target is more a measuring stick than a business plan, a way of asking how far the DCU brand travels once you strip out the cape and the Daily Planet building.

What the opening weekend does tell us is whether the DCU has an audience beyond its flagship hero. A soft number here, on the back of Supergirl's stumble, starts to look like a pattern rather than a one-off. A surprise overperformance changes that conversation fast.

Either way, the real test isn't the first weekend. It's whether Clayface holds through its second and third, the way genre titles with word-of-mouth tend to, or falls off a cliff the way disappointments usually do. October 23 settles the opening number. The weeks after settle the rest.