Clayface Box Office: $3.5M Thursday Previews Stun DC

DC's strangest bet of the year just passed its first real test — in public, with money on the table. According to Deadline, Clayface earned an estimated $3.5 million from Thursday preview screenings, with shows starting as early as 2 p.m., ahead of its official opening today, Friday 23 October. For an R-rated body-horror film about a Batman villain most casual fans could not pick out of a lineup, that is not a soft start. That is a statement.

The film itself is the gamble in miniature. Director James Watkins, working from a script by Mike Flanagan and Hossein Amini, tells the story of Matt Hagen, a rising actor whose face — and career — are destroyed in one bad night, and who takes an experimental treatment that hands both back at a price. No Batman. No Justice League. Just a monster, a melting face and a warning label.

Context matters here, because this film spent the month being quietly written off. Tracking at various points had it anywhere between $23 million and $33 million for the weekend, then presales cooled and some reads dropped below $20 million — one tracker even had its presales running roughly 80% behind Supergirl at the same point, and Supergirl is nobody's idea of a good omen after this summer. Against that backdrop, $3.5 million before Friday even starts changes the conversation. The weekend forecast now sits at $20 million to $25 million, against a reported net production cost of about $44 million before marketing.

How $3.5 million stacks up

Preview numbers are the first honest poll of audience intent, and Clayface is polling well. Its $3.5 million tops the $2 million previews of Kraven the Hunter, which crawled to an $11 million opening, and it sits just behind the $4 million previews of Birds of Prey, which opened to $33 million. Horror math flatters it further: 2022's Smile started with $2 million previews and legged out a $22.6 million debut, while Other Mommy recently turned $3.6 million previews into a $27.8 million opening. Critics are not the problem either — the film goes into the weekend Certified Fresh at 76% on Rotten Tomatoes.

The fight for No. 1

Winning Thursday is one thing; winning the weekend means beating a documentary. A24's You Can See Everything expands to roughly 2,600 locations this weekend after a record-breaking limited run, and it has already stolen one daily crown from Street Fighter this week. If Clayface holds No. 1, it hands the newly combined Paramount-Warner Bros. its second straight weekend win, right after Street Fighter's $31 million debut.

The honest answer: previews are the easiest money a horror film ever makes, because the faithful show up first. Saturday is where this is decided — if the drop is gentle, a $25 million finish and a very relieved DC Studios are on the table. My take: Gunn and Safran built this as the cheap, weird experiment, and the experiment is working. A $44 million villain movie with no Batman just out-earned its own tracking. Whatever happens Sunday, that sentence was not supposed to be writable.

Related: Clayface Box Office Tracking: $30M Opening Prediction — what the trackers expected before the previews landed. Also see You Can See Everything: $15M Record Documentary Opening — the little documentary standing between Clayface and No. 1.