Clayface's first reactions are raves — its box office tracking still looks like Madame Web

The first screenings verdict is in, and it's the best news DC has had since Superman. When the social embargo dropped on the evening of October 13, Variety's roundup headline led with the phrase now following the movie everywhere:

"#Clayface is freakishly awesome."

— Brandon Davis, in first reactions

Davis also called Tom Rhys Harries "a star," Collider's Steven Weintraub declared the film "fantastic" and a hard R that needs zero DC homework, and other early viewers praised James Watkins' unsettling Gotham and the gore. Per Forbes' survey of the reactions, the negative takes so far amount to none.

The numbers the adjectives haven't touched

The commercial picture, as of October 14, is where it stood before the raves. Boxoffice Pro's forecast still reads $23–33 million for October 23, the Box Office Theory presale data that r/boxoffice tracks still shows Clayface trailing Resident Evil by a wide margin, and the comp sheet still includes Madame Web, which opened to $15.3 million and expired at $100 million worldwide. Global Box Office's more cheerful $30 million-plus read exists too — the forecasts disagree with each other more than critics disagree about the film.

This is the exact inverse of June, and the fans noticed first. Supergirl tracked respectably, drew warm early social reactions of its own, then posted a 52 percent score and watched its presales collapse into a $125 million loss.

"People truly want this movie to fail."

— a commenter on r/horror, 23 upvotes

That comment, written before the embargo even lifted, blamed the Supergirl hangover and general anti-Gunn sentiment for the gloom around the tracking. Another user noted after the reactions landed that the responses were filled with people gushing — a sentence nobody wrote about Supergirl in week three of its run.

Don't miss: Clayface is tracking like Madame Web (even its writer is keeping his distance)

The nine days that settle it

The mechanism that killed Supergirl can run in reverse. Horror audiences buy late, a week-before-Halloween release is the most forgiving runway in the calendar, and Other Mommy just opened at No. 1 on a 17 percent score — proof the genre converts attention into tickets on short notice, quality optional. If raves can't lift a $40 million horror movie's presales in nine days, nothing was going to.

Previously we wrote: The Debut release date: A24's movie puts Julianne Moore under Paul Giamatti's spell

The risk my gut keeps snagging on is the asymmetric one: Clayface becoming the best-reviewed thing the DCU has produced and the least attended, the mirror image of Supergirl's well-tracked flop. The movie opens October 23 against Street Fighter, Wildwood, and Klara and the Sun, and the DCU's horror experiment lives or dies on which of its two datasets — the adjectives or the presales — was telling the truth.

Supergirl's warm first reactions became a 52 percent score and a $125 million loss. Clayface's first reactions came in warmer, against colder presales.