DC’s Clayface film got its first teaser trailer, and this (probably) R-rated Halloween feature looks as unsettling as you’d want from a Mike Flanagan production. The movie follows Matt Hagen (Tom Rhys Harries), an image-obsessed actor whose career ends when his face becomes disfigured in an accident. In an attempt to get back his old looks, he signs up for an experimental procedure that accidentally turns him into an amorphous, shape-shifting blob man. The first teaser is mostly a tone piece, highlighting Hagen’s devolving psyche and his inability to move on from his old life, which drives him toward becoming a monster that hits people with a big club arm.
While Sony has given villain-centric superhero films a bad name in recent years (Kraven, Morbius, etc.), there is plenty of reason to be excited about this project. It’s the brainchild of horror aficionado Flanagan, who has been trying to get this movie greenlit for years. While he wasn’t able to convince those in charge of the old DC film universe (the DC Extended Universe or DCEU), the James Gunn-helmed DC Universe (DCU) made room for the idea. However, a strange byproduct of this arrangement is that since Clayface is in the DCU, it’s entirely disconnected from Matt Reeves’ recent The Batman film or The Penguin spin-off, a great recent example of a Batman villain origin story. Because Reeves is still working on his Batman films, there won’t be a Dark Knight-focused DCU movie until The Brave And The Bold, which doesn’t have a release date. Clayface will be the third film in the DCU when it comes out on October 26, 2026, following up on Gunn’s Superman and this summer’s Supergirl film.
As for the rest of the crew, James Watkins (Speak No Evil, The Woman in Black), another horror veteran, will be directing, and Hossein Amini (Drive) will be co-writing the script along with Flanagan. Tom Rhys Harries (White Lines, Suspicion, Dr. Who) will play Clayface, Naomi Ackie (Sorry Baby, Mickey 17) will be Dr. Caitlin Bates, the mad scientist who turns Hagen into a blob man, and Max Minghella will play Bates’ Gotham City detective boyfriend (not a good profession for your significant other to have if you’re turning guys into goop monsters). With perceptions of the MCU souring—the only remotely consistent thing dubbed a “cinematic universe”—it will be interesting to see if Gunn’s DCU will succeed outside the realm of a certain Kryptonian.