Clayface is giving the DCU something to smile about after last summer’s Supergirl mega-flop.
It is currently sitting at a 94% audience score and $24 million domestic, with another $19 million international. This is an R-rated movie, and has a budget that could be as low as $30 million, depending on which report you believe.
So something different has worked here. This has started online discussion about how, and why, the DCU is different from the MCU, with movies and shows feeling much more separate from each other.
In the plus column, they can be more experimental. In the negative column, people wonder where all this is going and what the big payoff will be, as the MCU built toward Infinity War and Endgame.
Gunn, as usual, engaged in this conversation via social media, saying on Threads:
“DCU is just an alternate universe; we can enter at any location or time and tell THAT story. I dislike the idea that individual stories aren’t meaningful unless they lead to something else.
People not understanding this is strange to me, because Star Wars has essentially been doing this for 50 years across movies, shows, games, and books, admittedly without the tonal variety.
Now, this doesn’t mean there isn’t connectivity.
The Superman Saga starts with ‘Superman‘ and travels into ‘Man of Tomorrow‘ and onward, and contains many characters we’ve introduced in other stories. But that doesn’t mean those other stories only exist to set up what’s happening there.
I would love people to be seeing ‘Clayface’ because it’s a great, fun horror movie unto itself, not because of where else Clayface will show up three movies from now.”
Gunn also confirmed there is movement on both Wonder Woman and Swamp Thing movies.
