The Clayface Pitch Outlived Everyone Who Said No to It

The first horror movie DC Studios ever made started as a pitch to a studio boss who no longer has the job. It was about a version of the character who died in 1986, by a writer who isn't making it. The Clayface pitch outlived everyone who said no to it, and I think the pitch is still in there. I think I can see it in the trailer.

Mike Flanagan said publicly in January 2021 that he wanted a standalone Clayface film. His words were horror, thriller, tragedy. He said what got him was the voice of the actor who played Clayface in the cartoon episode Feat of Clay, 30 years ago. He took it to DC that year, and DC didn't bite. Two years later there was a new DC run by two new people. He walked in and pitched it again, and this time the pitch had one more phrase in it: not a villain. They bought it and greenlit it. About five months later Flanagan was gone, to another job at another studio, on a different horror franchise with his name on it. A new writer rewrote it. A new director shot it in Liverpool, of all places, standing in for Gotham. So the movie that opens on the 23rd is built on a four-year-old pitch that survived two regimes, one rewrite, and the departure of the man who wanted to make it.

My Clayface predictions go on the record a week before the screening

I don't chase announcements. The morning they drop, I hold a picture of what I think a thing actually is, pin it to the corkboard with the evidence next to it and a date on it, and when the real thing shows up we find out how wrong I was. Today the corkboard is Clayface, and the timing is on purpose.

The people who made it have been talking for six months. There was a teaser in April, the boss on Threads the next day telling us where it sits, Comic-Con in July, a final trailer in September, and last week a behind-the-scenes piece with Gunn, Reeves and the lead actor, all telling us what it is. Next Tuesday the screening crowd walks into a theater in Atlanta, and I'm one of them. The day after that, the reviews drop at once. So I'm putting my predictions down a full week ahead: not a frame of the film, not a review, just their words and the evidence with a date on it. On Wednesday the 21st, the minute I'm allowed to talk, the corkboard gets graded in public.

Batman isn't in Clayface, and The Penguin shows why that doesn't scare me

The question I keep seeing in headlines is whether Batman is in it. No. Batman's not in the cast and he's not in the footage, and the studio has been really clear about that since the teaser. The reason that question doesn't scare me the way it scares the headlines is a show that came out two years ago.

The Penguin, September 2024: eight episodes about Oz Cobb, Sofia Falcone and a kid named Vic, set in a Gotham where Batman is off the streets for a season, and the show never once needs him. It's a crime story. It ends with Oz on top, Sofia in a cell and Vic in the river. It got 24 Emmy nominations and nine wins, Cristin Milioti took lead actress, and the finale drew the biggest audience of the run. Showrunner Lauren LeFranc has said on the record it was meant to be a limited series.

Put that next to the control group, which is Sony: Venom, Morbius, Madame Web, Kraven. Five movies about Spider-Man villains with no Spider-Man, and every one of them treats the hole where the hero should be like something you step around and hope nobody looks down. The Penguin did the opposite. The hole was the plot. Nobody's coming, so Oz can rise. The absence had a job, and the show kept the faith while doing it, with Oz, Sofia, Francis, the Falcones and the Maroni all from the page. It didn't need the cape to make you care about the people. It needed the people.

So here's what The Penguin proved, for everybody after it: a villain story works without the hero when the hero's absence is a condition of the story instead of a hole in it. The Penguin earned Clayface the right to exist without Batman. It did not earn Matt Hagen your investment.

Gotham and the Joker sequel show the same temptation from two directions

I've also seen this exact setup fail twice, and I want to be careful here, because I'm allowed to not like a thing but I'm not allowed to just bash it. Gotham, the Fox show, 2014, was Bruno Heller's pitch, in his words: "What if young James Gordon was the detective who investigated the murder of Bruce Wayne's parents?" In the same interview he described a world that was going to become the familiar world of Batman, but wasn't there yet. Five seasons later, the show ends with Bruce Wayne in the cowl on a rooftop.

The Gordon show became the Batman origin show. Every character stopped being a person and really started being a name tag for who they'd turn into, and you could feel the show checking whether you'd noticed. I'm not saying it's bad. What I am saying is that it changed what it was, and what it changed into was the famous thing it promised it wasn't about. That's one direction.

Here's the other. Joker in 2019 made a billion dollars: a Gotham with no Batman, a villain story that ends, and it worked because it ended. Then the sequel came, with a reported budget somewhere around 200 million, a D CinemaScore, and losses Variety projected, I think, between 150 and 200 million dollars. You can tell me the first movie still stands on its own, and I'd tell you a story that proved it could end and then didn't looks a little different afterward. It looks like it never meant it.

Two failures, two directions, same temptation. A story set before the famous thing, or really beside it, has one structural temptation: to pay off with the famous thing instead of with itself. Gotham did it forward, the Joker sequel did it backward, and The Penguin didn't do it at all.

The movie's Matt Hagen comes from Feat of Clay, not the comics

Here's where I think most of the coverage has one thing wrong. Everybody keeps saying this is Matt Hagen, and the character is named Matt Hagen, so fine. But there are two Clayface that matter, and the movie is quietly using the wrong one's biography.

Basil Karlo is the first, from Detective Comics number 40, June 1940, by Bill Finger and Bob Kane. He's a washed-up horror actor who finds out they're remaking his old movie without him, so he puts on the costume of a villain he once played and starts murdering the new cast in the order their characters die in the script. That's Clayface in 1940: an actor with no powers who used to be somebody. Matt Hagen is the second, from Detective Comics 298, December 1961. He isn't an actor. He's a treasure hunter who falls into a radioactive pool of protoplasm in a cave and comes out able to turn into anything. The catch is that it wears off, so he has to go back to the pool every couple of days or he's a man again, and Batman beats him by finding the pool. Hagen dies in Crisis on Infinite Earths number 12, March 1986, in a crowd scene, killed by a shadow demon next to a character called the Bug-Eyed Bandit.

So in the comics, Hagen is a treasure hunter with a chemistry problem. The movie's Hagen is an actor with a crime boss problem. That's Feat of Clay, from 1992. The cartoon took the Hagen name and gave it Karlo's life. Matt Hagen is a movie star whose face got wrecked. A crooked businessman named Roland Daggett hands him a cream called Renew You that fixes his face and lets him wear other people's faces. It's temporary, it's addictive, and Daggett owns the supply, so Hagen does crimes for him to keep his face on. When he says no, Daggett's men pour a vat of the stuff down his throat.

Look at the trailer again with that in your head. A rising actor gets disfigured by a Gotham crime boss. A fringe scientist with an experimental treatment gives him his face back and tells him he has to learn to control it. A cop gets told Matt Hagen can change his face. That's Daggett, Renew You and the vat, with the pieces redealt. They handed the cream to a woman and gave her a name, and the side effect in the cartoon, him needing more of it, is the whole second act now. And honestly, good, because the 1961 Hagen is a gimmick and the cartoon's Hagen is a tragedy, and Flanagan told us in 2021 which one he was buying. Feat of Clay ends with a man who used to have a face in a vat as a monster forever. It's the saddest half hour that show ever made. If you're adapting that, you're adapting a story that ends. The question is whether the movie has the nerve to leave him there.

The $40 million budget and the casting point to one movie that ends

Look at what the production actually paid for, because I think every one of these choices is a tell. The budget is 40 million dollars, by The Hollywood Reporter's number, and their words were stripped down. Superman was reported north of 200. This is a fifth of that, with an R on it and no cape in it, and that number is the whole personality of the movie. At 200 million, you owe the studio a third act in the sky and a reason for the Justice League to show up. At 40 million, you owe him nobody. You can make a movie about one man's face and let it be sad, because sad is cheap and sad is what Flanagan really does.

James Watkins directs. He made Eden Lake and Speak No Evil, movies where ordinary people get cornered and the camera doesn't flinch. You hire that for a monster movie when the monster is the last thing you want the audience looking at. Tom Rhys Harries is Hagen. Gunn said they found him after a long and incredibly exhaustive search, which is what you say when you looked at every famous person first and didn't cast one. You know him if you know him, from White Lines and Suspicion: handsome, Welsh, nobody's movie star yet. That's the instrument. The character is a man who was almost famous and lost his face before he got there. Cast an actual star and the audience spends the movie mourning the star. Cast a guy on the way up and you're seeing what the character is seeing. They cast the role's own biography.

Naomi Ackie plays the scientist, Dr. Caitlin. She's been Whitney Houston in I Wanna Dance with Somebody and appeared in Mickey 17 and Blink Twice. The Hollywood Reporter described the character as a fringe scientist and compared her to Elizabeth Holmes. You could read that as mad scientist, but the Holmes comparison says founder: someone who believes the pitch harder than the data and gets a desperate man to say yes because she already said yes to herself. Ackie plays conviction, and you hire that to make the audience want the treatment to work.

Max Minghella is a Gotham police detective dating her, and I think that's going to be the triangle. In most versions of this story the other man is the obstacle. Here the other man is the badge, the woman in the middle is the one who made the monster, and the monster can wear the other man's face. The final trailer shows Eddie Marsan's face sliding off to reveal Hagen's underneath. Sam Raimi did this exact movie in 1990 with Darkman: scientist, mob boss, face destroyed, synthetic skin that only holds for 99 minutes, and a back half spent wearing his enemies' faces to get them, beat for beat. Every one of these is a one-off choice, I think: the budget, the director, the unknown lead, the founder instead of the mad scientist, the triangle. None of them is how you build a brick in a wall. Everything they bought says one movie that ends.

James Gunn's "very connected" is the fact fighting the budget

That brings me to the two facts fighting each other. Fact one is everything above: 40 million dollars of one-off. Fact two is the boss. At a DC Studios presentation IGN covered, James Gunn explained why this isn't a Reeves movie: Clayface is totally DCU, and the character was very outside the grounded, non-super-metahuman characters in Matt's world. Fair. Reeves' Gotham doesn't have powers, and a man made of clay is a power. So the character moved and Reeves came with it as a producer, which is the pedigree: the man who produced the proof of concept is standing behind the test case.

Then Gunn on Threads in April. Asked whether this is before or after Superman, he said before, that it's the first DCU film out of chronological order, and separately that it's "very connected" to the wider story. I've gone looking for what that means, and so far the connections are set dressing: a Ferris Air logo on Hagen's airplane headrest in the final trailer, tying back to Carol Ferris in Lanterns, and a Janus Cosmetics ad, Black Mask's company, in the background of a Lanterns episode in August. That's fine. That's the Penguin kind of connection, a city that's the same city. The director said almost exactly that last week to SFX: "You're in a city called Gotham. So, I guess you feel the shadow of the bat inherently because of the nature of where you are." The shadow, not the bat.

Nobody has said on the record whether Matt Hagen ever shows up again; I looked and found nothing either way. And last week Reeves himself, in the behind-the-scenes piece, said "it's a horror thriller, but it's also a revenge story." Revenge stories end. The person gets their revenge or they doesn't, and then it's over. So 40 million dollars says let it end, and very connected says don't. Those two facts can't both be the movie, and the last two minutes decide which one it is. If the last reel points at a bat, a shadow on a rooftop, a file on a desk, a line about a man in a cowl, that's Gotham the series, the famous thing preinstalled. If Hagen's story ends on Hagen, that's The Penguin.

What would prove my Clayface read right, and what would break it

Here's the picture on the corkboard one week before I walk into that theater: this is Feat of Clay at feature length, a tragedy about one man wearing a Batman villain's name so the studio would pay for it. Batman's absence is a condition of the story, not a hole in it, and the story ends on its own man. Watch for a Roland Daggett, by that name or any other, because the cartoon needs the man who holds the cream. Watch for a clock on the treatment, something Hagen has to come back for; the scientist believing it before it works; Hagen wearing a face we've already seen in the movie, because the trailer promised it with Marsan; and an ending that closes, a man in a vat or the movie's version of one, and then the credits.

Here's what breaks it. Batman shows up, any Batman, any frame. Clayface gets a hero beat, the moment you're supposed to cheer the monster. The treatment is a one-time cure with no cost, no clock and no coming back, because then the addiction's gone and so is the one reason the cartoon worked. Or the last two minutes point at the famous thing: a tag, a file, a rooftop, anything that tells you the next movie matters more than this one. The hope is the same sentence as the concern: I'm walking in next week wanting them to have had the nerve. If any of those land on the 21st, I'll tell you I read the evidence wrong.

There's no score from me today, because there's no movie yet, not for me, not until next Tuesday night, and I'm not going to put a number on six months of trailers and interviews. DC spent two years telling us the universe was the product. The first time they go into the dark and go small, they go to a man who has no powers until somebody sells him some, in a city with no hero in it, in a story a different writer pitched to different bosses who said no. The pitch kept its shape after everyone who touched it was gone, and that's the most Clayface thing about it. The one thing that could still break it is the studio deciding the shape has to keep going. If The Penguin and the Gotham Matt Reeves built, the grime, the rain, the people instead of the capes, is the DC you keep going back to, then Clayface is the movie to see this month. Different universe, same street.

What single moment on screen would convince you this Clayface movie is not the self-contained tragedy described here?