Clayface Opens on Friday and the DCU Still Has No Batman

Clayface opens in US theatres on 23 October 2026, and it is a Batman villain film with no Batman in it. The DC Universe is introducing Gotham’s villains before it has introduced Gotham’s hero. The Batman audiences have actually seen belongs to a separate continuity, and the film that will fix that has no release date.

The film arriving on Friday

Clayface is a body horror film directed by James Watkins from a screenplay by Mike Flanagan and Hossein Amini. Tom Rhys Harries plays Matt Hagen, a Gotham actor whose face is destroyed by a crime boss and who accepts an experimental treatment that goes wrong. It runs 108 minutes and carries an R rating.

The production history is worth noting because it explains the film’s size. This started as a script James Gunn liked enough to greenlight, not as a tentpole he had planned for years. A villain film with a horror director and a modest cast is a small bet next to a Superman sequel. It can absorb a bad opening weekend in a way a flagship cannot.

Why the villains come first

The DCU so far has Superman, Supergirl, Green Lantern and Peacemaker, and one Batman project: The Brave and the Bold, with Andy Muschietti attached to direct. Casting for Batman has not been announced, and there is no release date. Meanwhile a Clayface film is four days from opening.

That order is deliberate. A villain film asks nothing of the audience except a ticket. You do not need to have seen Superman to follow a man losing his face. The previous run of DC films did the opposite and paid for it. Batman v Superman arrived in 2016 with a Batman nobody had met in his own film, and the universe never recovered the goodwill.

There is a version of this that fails. If Clayface opens soft, the lesson executives take is that minor villains do not sell, and the slate gets safer rather than stranger. Warmer reception gives Gunn cover to keep making small films between the big ones, which is the only structure that has ever produced a good shared universe.

The Batman who is not here

Part of the audience will walk in expecting Robert Pattinson, because Matt Reeves is a producer on this film. He is not in it, and he cannot be. DC has confirmed that the Pattinson films sit in their own universe, separate from the DCU.

The sequel’s own production has been unsettled. Deadline reported on 15 October 2026 that Steven Soderbergh is stepping in to help finish The Batman Part II, with Reeves stepping back for a family matter while staying involved in the film. Nobody is calling that a collapse. It is still an awkward shape for a shoot that has months to go.

A Batman universe without Batman can hold for one film

Gotham works as a setting because it is corrupt before any hero arrives. A film about the people the city chews up is a legitimate use of the licence, and it is cheaper than a Batman film. Those economics are the whole argument, and they hold as long as the films are good.

It stops holding when the audience starts asking where the hero is. Two villain films in a row with no Batman would turn a strategy into a delay. That delay is the one thing the DCU cannot afford while Marvel releases two films a year.

I would put the ceiling at one more. Clayface now, something else small next year, and Batman cast before 2028 or the question changes from what is Gunn building to what is Gunn avoiding.

The thing I would actually judge it on

Judge it on one question: whether a horror film with a comic book name can stand alone in October and make money. Sony tried villain films without heroes and produced Venom, Morbius and Kraven the Hunter, and only one of those worked. The difference was never the concept. It was whether the film was any good.

Clayface is the cheapest test of that this studio will get. If it earns a sequel, the villains-first plan is real. If it does not, the next DCU announcement will be a hero.

For the earlier argument about how these universes are built, the comparison of how Marvel and DC handled permanence covers the structural side of the same problem. The three live action Spider-Men are the clearest case of one character carrying three continuities at once. The production detail here comes from GameRant’s explainer of 19 October 2026 and Deadline’s report on The Batman Part II.