Clayface is officially joining the new DC Universe more than a year after Mike Flanagan pitched his take on the shapeshifting supervillain.
Deadline has confirmed that DC Studios has greenlit the feature film, for which Flanagan has been tapped to write the script amid his work on the upcoming Exorcist reboot. We understand the studio is still searching for a director.
Flanagan has expressed his interest in making a standalone Clayface movie, writing on Twitter in 2021 that he wants to approach the film as a “horror/thriller/tragedy.”
In March 2023, our sources told us that Flanagan’s take on Clayface will not feature the character as a villain, after the writer and Intrepid Pictures partner Trevor Macy had a meeting with DC Bosses James Gunn and Peter Safran, who took over at DC Studios in 2022.
Although Flanagan wasn’t pitching the character to be part of Matt Reeves’ DC elseworld, other sources have said that Clayface is a big addition to Reeves’ The Batman 2.
Clayface got his DC introduction as part of Detective Comics #40 in June of 1940. While there would eventually be a number of shape-shifting DC antagonists using that alias, the original Clayface was a moderately successful actor who adopted the identity of a character he’d portrayed in a horror pic after turning to crime. He’s a frequent adversary of Batman with a body seemingly made out of clay who has appeared over the years in numerous films, television series, animated works, video games and other forms of media, being portrayed on the series Gotham (The CW) and Pennyworth (Epix/HBO Max) by Brian McManamon and Lorraine Burroughs, respectively. The rationale behind Clayface’s appearance emerged in comics of the 1970s, which evolved the character into a scientist with hormone irregularities.