One of Batman’s most iconic villains recently stole the show in HBO’s hit Penguin series, and now another Dark Knight antagonist is up to bat, but this time on the big screen. Variety is reporting that DC Studios has greenlit a feature film built around the shape-shifting villain Clayface, and the script is being written by Doctor Sleep and The Haunting of Hill House creator Mike Flanagan according to a source close to the production. While not much else is known, filming is expected to begin early in 2025.
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Flanagan is busier than ever, but Clayface is a villain he’s wanted to work on for a while. Back in 2021 Flanagan tweeted that he was “really keen to do a standalone Clayface movie as a horror/thriller/tragedy”, and he reportedly pitched a Clayface project to DC Studios in 2023. Now the project is finally becoming a reality, and it’s actually a pretty busy month for the powerhouse villain.
That’s because Alan Tudyk is bringing a version of the character to life in the DC Studios premiere series Creature Commandos on Max, which released its first two episodes last week. This follows the previous interpretation of Clayface from Tudyk in the Harley Quinn series, and if this ends up getting fast tracked, we could see three different versions of Clayface on screens over the course of two or three years, which is impressive.
Flanagan has a brand new take on Universal’s The Exorcist hitting in 2026, and now he’s bringing one of Batman’s key villains to the big screen. That’s interesting due to his previous pitch of a horror/thriller/tragedy, and one can’t help but wonder how Flanagan will merge those two worlds into something unique and perhaps a bit terrifying at times.
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It’s one of several reasons why we thought Clayface would make a perfect candidate for a series or movie of his own. His origin story and how that blends with the world of Hollywood and theater gives a lot of room to play, and this was done wonderfully in the outstanding Batman: One Bad Day – Clayface one-shot.
If the new film follows some of those ideas as a guide and then leans a bit more into the horror elements, we could end up getting something pretty special and also very different from the on-screen interpretations that have come before.
As for the interpretations on the small screen, Tudyk recently explained the vast difference between his two versions of the character in an interview with Rotten Tomatoes, as his Creature Commandos version will shake things up considerably from the lovable dunce seen in Harley Quinn.
“Then in this [Creature Commandos], Clayface is a killer he’s…. we have a huge fight and he’s a homicidal maniac. So it’s the same character. That’s really cool about DC, I get to play the actual same character two completely different ways and I like them both. It’s really nice that James let me play Clayface [in Creature Commandos], I was so happy I didn’t even have to ask. I was going to ask when I saw it in there and he let me know that I got to do it,” Tudyk said.
Are you excited for the Clayface movie? You can talk all things DC and Batman with me on Threads @mattaguilarcb and on Bluesky @knightofoa!
