James Gunn is out, and suddenly Clayface is a flop

The sequence matters, so here it is in order. On November 9, Skydance removed James Gunn and Peter Safran from the top of DC Studios and installed Marvel veteran Jeremy Latcham as president and chief creative officer. Within a day, Variety's exit post-mortem was framing the pair's record as "spent big, lost money" — and inside it, Clayface, sitting at $109 million worldwide on a $44 million budget, got this verdict: "sources suggest the body-horror thriller won't break even until the studio factors in downstream revenues."

Read that sentence twice. A movie that has grossed two and a half times its budget, with Thanksgiving still ahead of it, is a flop — unless you count the money it makes, in which case it isn't.

The math nobody ran for A24

Box-office watchers immediately produced the comparison that breaks the framing. Alex Garland's Civil War cost $50 million, grossed $127 million worldwide, and A24 spent 2024 celebrating it as the biggest hit in company history. Clayface cost less, and is heading for roughly the same finish line — the r/boxoffice thread doing this math landed on the only honest conclusion:

"I think the suggestion otherwise is basically weaponizing standard Hollywood Accounting to justify canning Gunn and Safran. It's 'unprofitable' in the sense that basically every movie is 'unprofitable'."

Hollywood accounting can make any film unprofitable on paper; that's what it's for. The question is why that machinery got switched on for this film, this week.

Civil War: $50 million budget, $127 million gross, the pride of A24. Clayface: $44 million budget, the same trajectory, "won't break even."

A flop is an alibi

My read: Clayface isn't a flop, it's an alibi. Skydance needed the story of its DC takeover to be a rescue, and a rescue requires a disaster — so the regime's one genuinely cheap, genuinely profitable, genuinely weird bet gets reclassified as part of the wreckage. The actual wreckage was available next door: Supergirl really did lose money, grossing $126 million against a $170 million budget. But "we fired them over Supergirl" indicts one tentpole; "even their hits lost money" indicts a philosophy.

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And the philosophy is the point, because it tells you what comes next. The Gunn era's signature move was Clayface itself — an R-rated body-horror film about a C-list villain, greenlit at a price where $109 million is a win. Latcham arrives from fifteen years of Marvel package-building, reporting to Skydance film chiefs who answer for franchise output. The cheap strange corner of DC is what just got written off as a loss; what replaces it will be engineered to never need an asterisk, which is another way of saying it will be Batman your grandmother has heard of.

Previously we wrote: If a profitable $618 million Superman isn't a hit, what DC movie will Skydance ever call one?