DCU co-chiefs James Gunn and Peter Safran have provided exciting details about the upcoming movie Clayface, confirming its status within the DCU canon and its R rating.
Clayface, a character with origins dating back to 1940 in Detective Comics #40, features Basil Karlo, a former criminal in Gotham City who possesses the unique ability to transform his clay-like body into anyone or anything. This power has made him one of Batman's most intriguing and enduring adversaries.
DC Studios announced last month that Clayface will hit theaters on September 11, 2026. The decision to greenlight this project was influenced by the success of HBO’s The Penguin series. Horror maestro Mike Flanagan is set to pen the screenplay, while Lynn Harris and The Batman director Matt Reeves will produce the film.
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At a recent DC Studios presentation attended by IGN, Gunn and Safran elaborated on why Clayface fits into the broader DCU, as opposed to Matt Reeves’ more grounded The Batman Epic Crime Saga.
“Clayface is totally DCU,” Gunn affirmed. Safran further clarified, “The only thing that's in Matt's world, his Crime Saga that he's telling, is the Batman Trilogy, the Penguin series. That's in that lane. So still under DC Studios, still under us. We have an incredible relationship with Matt, but those are the only things.”
Gunn emphasized the importance of integrating Clayface into the DCU, stating, “It was important that Clayface be part of the DCU. It's an origin story for a classic Batman villain that we want to have in our world.” He added that the character wouldn't suit the more realistic tone of Reeves’ universe, noting, “It was very outside of the grounded non-super metahuman characters in Matt's world.”
Safran revealed that DC Studios is currently negotiating with James Watkins, the director of Speak No Evil, to helm Clayface. With filming scheduled to begin this summer, Safran described the movie as “an incredible body horror film that reveals a compelling origin of a classic Batman villain.” He praised the screenplay penned by Flanagan, adding that Clayface might not be as well-known as The Penguin or The Joker, but its story is “equally resonant, compelling, and in many ways, more terrifying than one of those.”
Throughout the presentation, Safran described Clayface as “experimental” and an “indie style chiller,” while Gunn labeled it as “pure f***ing horror, like, totally real. Their version of that movie, it is so real and true and psychological and body horror and gross.”
Gunn confirmed that Clayface will definitely be rated R. Reflecting on the project, he said, “I think that one of the things Peter and I talked about when we first got the script is if we were producing movies five years ago when we were doing Belko Experiment and all of that stuff, and somebody had brought us this horror script called Clayface about this guy, we would have died to have produced this movie, because it was just a really excellent body horror script, and the fact that it's in the DCU is just a plus.”
