DC Studios dropped the first trailer for Clayface on Wednesday, giving audiences their most visceral look yet at the shape-shifting Batman villain — and signaling that James Gunn’s expanding DC Universe has no intention of playing it safe.
Directed by James Watkins, the film tracks the origins of Clayface through struggling actor Matt Hagen, played by Welsh actor Tom Rhys Harries. After a knife attack leaves his face disfigured, Hagen submits to an experimental medical procedure that initially repairs the damage — then catastrophically transforms his body into living clay capable of reshaping into anyone’s form. The trailer opens on Hagen bandaged and bleeding in a hospital bed, his face cycling through grotesque morphs before he wipes it clean in a bathtub in the film’s final, unsettling image.
The screenplay was written by horror director Mike Flanagan, with rewrites from Hossein Amini, the screenwriter behind Drive. Flanagan originally pitched the project directly to Gunn and Peter Safran after the new DC Studios leadership took over, and the studio greenlit it despite the character having no prior big-screen history. Gunn has said the pitch caught him completely off guard: he had not planned on making a Clayface film until Flanagan walked in the room.
DC Studios co-head Peter Safran has described the film’s tone as a full-on horror movie in the vein of David Cronenberg’s The Fly and Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance. The comparisons are deliberate — Clayface sits firmly in body-horror territory, a genre stretch for a studio whose output has centered on costumed heroes. The film carries a stripped-down budget of around $40 million, a fraction of the standard superhero tentpole.
Naomi Ackie plays Caitlin Bates, a biotech CEO who treats Hagen after the attack. Max Minghella co-stars as a Gotham City detective suspicious of his fiancée’s relationship with Hagen, and Eddie Marsan rounds out the supporting cast. The film is produced by Gunn, Safran, and The Batman director Matt Reeves, making it the first DCU project to touch Batman’s world ahead of Reeves’ own planned installment.
Principal photography ran from August 2025 through November in Liverpool, England — the same city used for locations in The Batman — under the working title Corinthians. Warner Bros. shifted the release from September 11 to October 23, 2026, explicitly to position the film as a Halloween season event.
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Clayface has existed in DC Comics since 1940, originally conceived as a washed-up actor who turns to crime. The character’s shapeshifting powers were added in 1961. Previous portrayals include Ron Perlman’s voice work on Batman: The Animated Series and Alan Tudyk on HBO Max’s Harley Quinn. This marks the first live-action theatrical version of the character.
