DC’s R-rated body-horror gamble opens today — and Deadline’s first numbers say the little movie is out-punching its weight class.
By Becky Monroe — The Cinephile, CelebnMusic247
Clayface is open, and the first real money is better than the nervous pre-release chatter suggested. Deadline reports the DC Studios body-horror film is off to a solid start with an estimated $3.5 million, if not more, from Thursday previews that began at 2 p.m. — a strong first step for an R-rated genre picture carrying a net production cost of $44 million before marketing, per Deadline’s reporting.
Deadline’s domestic weekend forecast sits between $20 million and $25 million, which would deliver the newly combined Paramount-Warner Bros. its second back-to-back No. 1 opening after last weekend’s Street Fighter ($31 million). The film is playing in some 3,400 locations, and international projections of $20-25 million across 76 territories point to a worldwide opening north of $45 million — already within sight of its production cost in a single weekend.
The comparisons are the encouraging part. Deadline notes Clayface’s preview haul tops the R-rated Kraven the Hunter ($2 million previews, $11 million opening) and lands not far behind the PG-13 DC spinoff Birds of Prey ($4 million previews, $33 million opening). Against fellow horror titles it sits level with Blumhouse’s Other Mommy ($3.6 million previews, $27.8 million opening), well ahead of 2022’s Smile ($2 million previews), and nearly triple the $1.2 million previews of Digger. Deadline also reported the film at 75% on Rotten Tomatoes as the weekend began, with audience scores running far hotter.
None of this was guaranteed. Presales had run soft all month — one tracker had the film pacing far behind Supergirl at the same point in its cycle — and the weekend’s No. 1 spot is not uncontested: A24’s Elizabeth Holmes documentary You Can See Everything won Wednesday with $2.3 million and expands from 855 theaters to about 2,600 on Friday, with a projected five-day total in the low $20 millions. The James Watkins-directed film, written by Mike Flanagan and Hossein Amini from Flanagan’s pitch and starring Tom Rhys Harries as disfigured actor Matt Hagen, has to hold its audience against a word-of-mouth phenomenon with a three-hour runtime and a fraction of its budget.
The 247 Take — This is exactly the opening the DCU’s small-budget lane needed: a $44 million horror movie doing in one night what $200 million tentpoles sweat over for a month. Whether Clayface finishes at $20 million or $25 million matters less than what it proves — that Gunn and Safran can make a profit-sized DC movie without a cape in the lead. The full verdict arrives with the weekend actuals.
More movie news at CelebnMusic247.com.
Sources: Deadline, Cosmic Book News, Fiction Horizon, Business Today
