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Clayface is heading for a $24 million to $25 million opening weekend, enough to win the domestic box office. It also came away with an A- CinemaScore, a grade horror movies almost never get.
Warner Bros. and DC Studios opened the film wide on October 23 against a reported $44 million budget. Deadline put Friday at $9.5 million including $3.5 million in Thursday previews, while Variety counted a $10.4 million opening day. Tracking going into the weekend had the opening between $25 million and $30 million.
Gunn Did the Math on Horror CinemaScores
James Gunn posted the grade to Threads with the context that gives it weight. “Really proud of this,” he wrote. “Sinners is the only horror movie to have EVER gotten an A Cinemascore.” By his count, three horror releases in the last couple of years have reached an A-: Obsession, Weapons and now Clayface.
That scarcity is the genre’s oldest scoreboard problem. CinemaScore polls opening-night crowds and asks them to grade a film the way a teacher would, and horror is built to send people out of the room unsettled rather than satisfied. C grades are routine for films the genre now treats as classics, and Other Mommy won a weekend this month with $27.5 million and a D+, the same grade audiences gave Hereditary. An A- from a Friday-night audience is the outlier, and it lines up with the first reactions out of the early screenings on October 14, which ran hard on how far the body horror goes.
An R Rating at the Top of the Chart
Clayface carries an R rating, the first in Gunn’s DC Universe, for strong bloody violence, gore, language, some nudity and brief drug use. James Watkins directs from a screenplay by Mike Flanagan and Hossein Amini, from a story by Flanagan, with Tom Rhys Harries as Matt Hagen alongside Naomi Ackie, Max Minghella, Eddie Marsan and David Dencik.
Watkins told Empire that the full creature design would stay out of the marketing until release, and the campaign held that line through three trailers. The strongest thing in any of them is still the quietest: Harries on a plane with his eyes sealed shut under smooth skin, long before any clay shows up.
Second place goes to A24’s You Can See Everything, which is heading for $19 million to $20 million in its second weekend after expanding to more than 2,500 screens. Next weekend brings the first Saturday Halloween since 2020, and Clayface goes into the last stretch of an October stacked with wide horror releases as the number one film in the country.
Fan verdict and scores by iHorror