James Gunn and his team’s idea was a good one: make the cheapest superhero movie possible in a genre that always succeeds: if they win, they prove that another kind of DC cinema is possible. If they lose, it gets swept under the rug. Clayface has cost only 40 million dollars and, reportedly, it was driven by a love of horror rather than, simply, wanting to line their pockets. However… the audience doesn’t seem to be buying it. Literally.
Time to roll around in the mud
For now, and despite a few influencers announcing that it’s the new Obsession (as if Obsession weren’t from just a few months ago), Clayface can’t manage to get off the ground and already holds the record… for the lowest ticket sales in the DC Universe. Yes, even fewer than Supergirl. In fact, it’s tracking 80% behind that one in ticket sales, and all the alarm bells are starting to ring at a Skydance that, in the early days of the merger, isn’t going to tolerate looking weak.
The movie opens next week, and box office experts have already said that we’re probably looking at yet another failure for DC: it will barely make 20 million dollars in its opening weekend, and we’ll have to see how it does internationally and whether it has legs to see whether it turns a profit (it would need around 100 million in total) or sinks into the mud. Oh, James Gunn.
Everything suggests that Gunn’s dream, which aimed to create a gigantic interconnected universe in a different way from Marvel, is collapsing under its own weight, despite the success of Lanterns. They’ll need, I’m afraid, strong box office numbers for Man of Tomorrow to keep greenlighting this kind of project. In the second round, DC is getting knocked out.
