DC Studios' 'Clayface' Opens Soft in First Box Office Test for Warner Bros. Under New Owner Skydance

DC Studios' first horror film, "Clayface," opened in North American theaters on Friday with $10.4 million, a modest start that leaves James Gunn's rebooted superhero studio with its second soft theatrical debut of the year and puts an early number on Warner Bros. Pictures' box office standing under its new corporate parent, Skydance.

The R-rated film, about the Batman villain Matt Hagen, took in $10.4 million from 3,458 theaters on opening day, according to the daily domestic chart kept by the-numbers.com, an average of roughly $3,000 per location. Including international markets, where the film began rolling out on Oct. 21, worldwide receipts stood at $18.2 million as of Friday. Forecasters at Boxoffice Pro had projected a three-day domestic weekend of $25 million to $30 million; tracking services that monitor advance ticket sales had flagged a softer outlook in the days before release, with one firm estimating presales were running roughly 80 percent behind "Supergirl" at a comparable point in its cycle. Final three-day estimates are expected Sunday.

Directed by James Watkins from a script credited to Mike Flanagan and Hossein Amini, "Clayface" stars newcomer Tom Rhys Harries as a disfigured actor who turns to an experimental treatment and becomes a shape-shifting killer, with Naomi Ackie, Max Minghella and Eddie Marsan in supporting roles. Warner Bros. Pictures, which lists the film on its official release page, has given its budget as between $30 million and $44 million depending on the accounting, considerably less than the studio's two previous DC Studios releases.

A rockier year for Gunn's DC Universe

"Clayface" is the third film released under the DC Studios banner run by Gunn and Peter Safran, who relaunched the franchise last year with "Superman," a $618 million global hit that opened to roughly $125 million domestically. The follow-up, June's "Supergirl," fared far worse: it opened to $37.1 million domestically against a reported $170 million budget, finished its run with roughly $72 million at home and $126 million worldwide, and is projected to cost Warner Bros. Discovery at least $85 million once marketing is factored in. Safran told the trade press at the time that "Supergirl" was "just one component" of the studio's long-term plan, a line repeated often as the slower-than-hoped rollout of the DC Universe continued.

Against that backdrop, "Clayface" was conceived as a cheaper, lower-risk bet: a horror-tinged origin story for a lesser-known villain rather than a marquee hero launch. Reviews have been more favorable than for "Supergirl." The film stood at 75 percent positive from 155 critics on Rotten Tomatoes, with an average score of 6.6 out of 10, and 59 out of 100 on Metacritic, denoting "mixed or average" notices; opening-night audiences gave it an A- CinemaScore. Several critics singled out Harries' performance even while faulting uneven pacing in the back half of the film, a split that trade reporters have described as a "crowd-pleasing" monster movie wrapped around a more conventional first act.

The first test under new ownership

The release also arrives at a pointed moment for Warner Bros. corporately. On Oct. 6, Paramount Skydance completed its roughly $81 billion acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery, a deal that, including assumed debt, was valued at close to $110 billion. Under the terms spelled out in the companies' Form 8-K filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Warner Bros. Discovery shareholders received $31.00 per share in cash, the combined company was renamed Skydance Corporation, and its shares began trading on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker SKYD, while Warner Bros. Discovery's stock stopped trading on Nasdaq the same day. "Clayface" is among the first Warner Bros. Pictures wide releases to reach theaters since that deal closed.

"Today is a historic day, not just for Skydance but for our entire industry," David Ellison, the company's chairman and chief executive, said in a statement announcing the merger's completion.

That statement, filed as an exhibit to the same SEC disclosure, laid out an ambitious set of commitments for the newly merged company: at least 30 theatrical films and more than 180 television shows a year, at least $6 billion in run-rate cost synergies within three years, and a reduction of net leverage by the end of the decade. Executives have said the combined studio — which now controls two film libraries, HBO Max and Paramount+, CBS, CNN and a roster of sports properties including CBS Sports and TNT Sports — reports close to $70 billion in annual revenue and more than $30 billion in combined content spending over the past twelve months. The deal closed only after Paramount Skydance settled an antitrust lawsuit brought by a coalition of 12 state attorneys general and a separate suit from the Writers Guild of America, which secured a five-year moratorium on layoffs at CBS News as part of its own settlement.

How the new leadership treats the DC film slate, inherited from Warner Bros. and still run day-to-day by Gunn and Safran, is one of the questions industry analysts are watching most closely as Skydance works through an integration expected to take years. Exhibitors, for their part, have mostly welcomed the merged company's pledge to keep a high volume of films flowing into theaters rather than shifting more releases straight to streaming, a strategy some of Skydance's rivals have leaned on more heavily in recent years.

What comes next

For now, "Clayface" is unlikely to move the needle much either way for Skydance's finances, given its comparatively modest budget. But the film's soft opening — even with better reviews than "Supergirl" managed — will add to scrutiny of whether DC Studios' slower, more varied slate of villain-centered and ensemble projects can draw the kind of opening-weekend crowds that Marvel's films once did routinely. Gunn's next DC Studios tentpole, a Superman sequel titled "Man of Tomorrow," is scheduled for release next summer, followed by "The Batman: Part II," starring Robert Pattinson, in October 2027. Both will arrive as the first fully Skydance-era theatrical releases to carry the weight of the company's "30 films a year" pledge, a target well above what either Paramount or the old Warner Bros. released on its own in recent years.

Box office trackers and studio accountants will get a clearer picture of "Clayface's" fortunes once Sunday's final weekend numbers are reported, and whether the film can hold up against counterprogramming from A24's awards-season documentary "You Can See Everything," which took the No. 2 spot on Friday in its second weekend of release. Warner Bros. has not announced additional DC Studios villain-origin films, and executives have given no indication of whether "Clayface's" performance will affect that strategy going forward.