'Clayface' Officially Opens With Less Than 45% of 'Supergirl's Box Office Preview Haul

Hannah covers horror, sci-fi, and games at Collider, where she writes news and features, reviews new releases, and interviews the people who make them. She’s helping build out Collider‘s gaming coverage, with Pokémon as one of her specialties. If she isn’t writing about a monster, she’s probably watching one on a tape from her VHS collection.

DC is getting pretty nasty just in time for Halloween. Clayface is now in theaters, bringing Batman’s shapeshifting villain into the DC Universe with Tom Rhys Harries underneath all that ruined skin. Directed by James Watkins, the body-horror movie is a big departure from the studio’s last theatrical release, Supergirl, and a perfectly grimy and gruesome introduction to its version of Gotham.

It is also a different kind of bet for James Gunn and Peter Safran. A Batman villain can certainly get comic-book fans into seats, but the horror audience could be just as important for a movie releasing just eight days before Halloween. Whether that combination can carry Clayface through its opening weekend is the question, especially after Supergirl struggled at the box office this summer.

Clayface brought in an estimated $3.5 million or more during Thursday previews, putting its initial estimate at roughly $4.3 million behind Supergirl‘s $7.8 million preview total, although it’s important to remember that Supergirl‘s total also included Wednesday fan screenings in addition to Thursday previews. Clayface‘s figure is also an early estimate, so that gap could change when the updated numbers arrive. The horror movie does have the stronger critical reception, entering the weekend with a 75% Certified Fresh score on Rotten Tomatoes, compared with Supergirl‘s 52%.

Four teams, four completely different reasons to put yourself in danger
for strangers. This is the roster you actually belong on, what they would want from you, and what it
would cost you to stay.

You belong where the stakes are largest and the personalities are
loudest. This is a team of people who are all used to being the most important person in the
room, which is exactly why it works and exactly why it keeps nearly falling apart.

• The Avengers are not friends who became a team. They are a team that slowly and
  reluctantly became friends, and you would recognise every stage of that process.
• You can hold your own among big egos without needing to win every exchange, which is the
  real entry requirement here.
• The arguing is part of the method. This group does its best thinking mid-disagreement,
  usually at volume, usually in a very expensive building.
• When the sky opens, they are who shows up. You would want to be standing in that line.

You have never had the luxury of being thanked for this. The
X-Men protect a world that has never once been comfortable with them existing, and something
in you understands exactly why they keep doing it anyway.

• This is the only team on the list whose central conflict is not a villain. It is being
  wanted gone by the same people they keep saving.
• You know what it is to be the outsider in a room and to decide, anyway, that you will
  not make yourself smaller so everyone else is comfortable.
• The X-Men are the most genuine found family in comics. People arrive with nowhere else
  to go and are never once asked to explain themselves.
• You would not be joining for the glory. There has never been any.

You do not want colleagues, you want your people. The Titans are
the team where the friendship came first and the world-saving turned up afterwards as an
inconvenient side effect.

• Every Titan is somebody’s sidekick who decided to stop being one. That decision, not the
  villain of the week, is what the team is actually about.
• You would be joining people who are all working themselves out at the same time as you,
  which is far less lonely than being the only one.
• The Titans lose regularly. Then they eat together and come back better, which is a more
  honest model of growing up than any other team here manages.
• The tower would be loud, chaotic, and the first place that ever felt like yours.

You are not asking who to trust. You worked out the answer a
while ago and it was nobody in a cape. This is where you go once you have decided the people
in charge need watching, and that nobody else is going to do it.

• The Boys have no powers, no mandate and no funding. What they have is leverage,
  patience, and a very high tolerance for consequences.
• You are the person in the room who notices the thing everybody else has quietly agreed
  not to mention.
• This is not a heroic team and it has never pretended otherwise. It is a group of damaged
  people doing necessary work in ways nobody would call clean.
• You would not sleep well. You would keep going anyway.

‘Clayface’ Has a Much Smaller Budget Than ‘Supergirl’

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    Image via DC</figure>