Clayface box office predictions are in, and James Gunn is defending the October 23 movie citing Casablanca
DC's cheapest gamble yet is tracking at a fraction of a superhero opening, and its co-CEO is comparing it to the most beloved film of 1942. Both things are going better than they sound.
The first Clayface projections landed in early October, and Boxoffice Pro's long-range forecast puts the opening at $23 million to $33 million domestic, with Box Office Theory slightly lower at $20 million to $26 million. For a DC movie, that number reads like a disaster. For this DC movie, it mostly doesn't, and the budget is why: Clayface cost about $40 million, which puts break-even somewhere around $80 million to $100 million worldwide. Director James Watkins' last film, Speak No Evil, opened to $11.3 million in 2024 and turned a profit.
The October 23 competition won't be the problem either: Wildwood is tracking at $10 million to $15 million, and Klara and the Sun and Ali G: Who Iz I? are fighting for what's left. The warning light is awareness. Only 32 percent of moviegoers know Clayface exists, though 21 percent of those who do plan to see it opening weekend.
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The Casablanca of it all
While the trades were doing math, a Threads user asked Gunn the question every original project gets: who the f—k asked for a Clayface movie. Gunn answered personally.
"Who tf asked for Back to the Future? Casablanca? There's Something About Mary?"
— James Gunn, on Threads
He kept listing: Pan's Labyrinth, Fury Road, Weapons, The Matrix. Then he spelled out the philosophy: Hollywood, Gunn wrote, isn't a place where the only way to make a movie is the public voting on IP they've already seen countless times, and he'd take a filmmaker's strange passion project — Mike Flanagan's original idea, shaped by Watkins and screenwriter Hossein Amini — over a listless script about a majorly popular character written by someone with no feel for it. The original poster deleted the question. Invoking Casablanca two weeks before release is the kind of bet that ages either very well or into a screenshot.
The last executive-approved comparison this bold was a comic-book villain movie nobody asked for. It was called Joker, and it made a billion dollars.
Why $23 million would be a win
The context is the DCU's whiplash 2026. Superman opened to $125 million and finished at $618.7 million worldwide. Supergirl, with a $170 million budget, opened to $38 million in June, stalled around $125 million worldwide, and by Deadline's estimate will lose roughly $125 million. Clayface is the course correction in miniature: R-rated body horror, a Batman villain who has never carried anything, Tom Rhys Harries as Matt Hagen with Naomi Ackie opposite, Matt Reeves among the producers, and a price tag one quarter of Supergirl's.
It's also the last DC movie for a while. Nothing else hits theaters until Man of Tomorrow in July 2027, so whatever Clayface does, it gets nine months of being the answer to "how is the DCU going." Gunn and Peter Safran's jobs are reportedly safe under new owner Paramount Skydance, and a $40 million experiment that breaks even with Halloween legs would prove the slate can afford weird. A $40 million experiment that opens at $17 million would prove something too, just not the thing anyone at DC wants proven by Christmas.
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