Clayface is tracking like Madame Web (even its writer is keeping his distance)
DC's October horror gamble is ten days out, the presale data has box-office watchers reaching for Sonyverse comparisons, and everyone attached to the movie is busy explaining which parts of it aren't theirs.
The official tracking story on Clayface sounds fine. Boxoffice Pro's long-range forecast has the October 23 release opening at $23–33 million domestic, and on October 13, Global Box Office reported the film trending toward $30 million-plus on a solid presale start.
The unofficial story is considerably darker. The data nerds on r/boxoffice, reading Box Office Theory's presale tracker, see presales that trail Resident Evil by a wide margin, a circulating report has them running well behind Supergirl's at the same point — and the comps people keep reaching for aren't DC's at all.
"Clayface is shaping up to be DC's version of the Sonyverse."
— a commenter on r/boxoffice
The Sonyverse comp has teeth because Boxoffice Pro itself put it on the table, listing Clayface against Morbius ($39 million opening), Kraven the Hunter ($11 million) and Madame Web — which opened to $15.3 million in February 2024 and died at $100 million worldwide. If Clayface lands at the bottom of its tracking range minus the usual long-range optimism, the Madame Web zone is exactly where it falls.
To be fair, Forbes' Paul Tassi flagged the caveats: Supergirl was a tentpole whose presales collapsed only after bad reviews, and a pre-Halloween horror movie lives or dies on word of mouth, not long-range trackers. Which makes today the hinge. The social embargo lifted October 13, one of the earliest in DCU history — a studio betting its reviews beat its presales.
Everyone is explaining whose movie this isn't
The stranger story is happening in the press tour, where the film's own parents keep adding asterisks. Mike Flanagan, whose name has sold this project since 2023 and who shares the screenplay credit, spent his Carrie promo telling ComicBookMovie he hasn't even seen the film and doesn't know how much of his script survived Hossein Amini's reported page-one rewrite.
"Clayface, you know, very much is not mine. It's James Watkins' movie."
— Mike Flanagan, to ComicBookMovie
Fans doing promo-tour forensics noticed the pattern before the trades wrote it up:
"Flanagan has spent almost the entire Carrie promotion distancing himself from this movie."
— a commenter on r/boxoffice
Then, on October 13, Warner Bros.' own press kit added a twist: in an interview sent to Batman News, producer Matt Reeves revealed the whole thing predates the DCU. After The Batman, Reeves wanted to spin Rogues' Gallery origin stories into smaller horror films, and Flanagan brought him the Clayface pitch.
The two were already developing what Reeves describes as "this sort of tragic love story — The Fly meets this horror thriller" when Gunn and Safran arrived in late 2022 and folded it into their universe.
Tally it up. The writer says it's Watkins' movie, the producer says it started as a Reeves movie, Gunn maintains the script is entirely Flanagan's story — and Gunn himself spent last week defending the project with a list of classics. That's a lot of provenance talk for a film that opens in ten days.
The writer hasn't seen it. The producer says it predates the studio. The studio boss is citing Casablanca.
What decides it
Two numbers to watch this week. First, the Rotten Tomatoes score: Supergirl's presales cratered after middling reviews, and the same mechanism can run in reverse for a cheap horror movie a week before Halloween — Other Mommy just pulled a No. 1 opening at 17%.
Second, the October 23 field, where Clayface faces Street Fighter plus Wildwood and Klara and the Sun, with a soft frame right after it. A $40 million movie doesn't need to escape the Sonyverse comps by much. It just needs to not open with a "1" in front.
Previously we wrote: Will Carrie be renewed for season 2? Mike Flanagan says true Stephen King fans already know where the series goes — reviews spotted his clue