DC Studios Now Working on Clayface Movie
DC Studios’ Clayface movie is officially in production.
Written by filmmaker Mike Flanagan (Midnight Mass, Doctor Sleep), the movie is set to centre on the shapeshifting Batman villain, Clayface, who has the power to transform his body into any person or object.
Filming is expected to being early next year, according to Variety. While there are no plot details at the moment, it’s likely the movie will adopt a dark tone given Flanagan’s horror pedigree. He pitched his Clayface project to DC Studios in 2023, but his ambition to bring it to life goes back years.
Robert Pattinson dressed in his iconic Batman guise. Could the actor return in Clayface?
Warner Bros
In 2021 Flanagan was asked on Twitter if there was a specific DC character he wanted to make a movie about. “Well I’ve wanted to do a Superman movie since I was a kid,” he replied, “but I would also be really keen to do a standalone Clayface movie as a horror/thriller/tragedy.”
The filmmaker won’t direct, however. Currently in high demand, Flanagan is signed up to both write and direct a new version of The Exorcist. As well as that, he’s also working with Amazon MGM Studios on adapting Stephen King‘s novel Carrie into a series on Prime Video.
Clayface first appeared in DC’s Detective Comics #40 in 1940. While portrayed under several different guises, his earliest depiction is a washed-up actor forced into a life of crime while wearing a clay mask. More recent iterations have given him power replication, voice mimicry, size alteration, density control, and superhuman strength.
Clayface seems an odd character to base a movie on for several reasons. He’s never been depicted in a live-action film before, so general knowledge of mainstream audiences is small. Devoting an entire movie to an untested character seems like a big risk when there’s the opportunity to do a spinoff series instead. HBO‘s The Penguin earned raved reviews earlier this year.
He’s also arguably not as compelling as Joker, Batman’s primary villain, whose pair of standalone movies earned a total box office of $1.3 billion. DC will need to look to Sony’s Spider-Man universe as a cautionary example of how not to do villain-centric spinoff films. In James Gunn’s rebooted DC universe, however, it seems anything is possible.