Clayface Wins the Weekend With About $24 Million, but It Is Not the DC Hit Anyone Hoped For

Photo: Steven Lek, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Clayface took the top spot at the North American box office on the weekend of October 23 to 25, with an opening of roughly $24 million from 3,458 theatres. Deadline put the global start at about $43 million. First place is first place, and nobody wins a weekend by accident, but I do not think anyone at DC Studios is popping champagne over these numbers.

Photo: MediaGamut, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

The reason is the gap behind it. Box office reports had A24's documentary You Can See Everything in second place with about $19.5 million, and on Sunday alone the documentary actually beat Clayface. When a comic book spin-off is that close to a film about Elizabeth Holmes, it tells me the comic book audience did not rush out the way it did for the big names.

Photo: Hakan Albağ, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

I understand why. Clayface is a smaller, stranger, body-horror take on a Batman villain, and it was never going to play like a summer tentpole. It also arrived in the busiest horror and Halloween stretch of the year, with plenty of other options on the same screens. I would rather see DC try odd, modest films than another safe repeat, and a title like this has a long tail on streaming.

Photo: Andrew Mcmillan, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Still, the trade press has noted that the opening does not carry the weight of the studio's big superhero launches, and I think that is fair. The second weekend will tell us more than the first. If the drop is steep, the story becomes about word of mouth. If it holds, people will talk about it as a slow burn.

Photo: Pixloom, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Did you go to see it opening weekend, or are you waiting for it to reach streaming? And do you want DC to keep making smaller horror-leaning films like this one?