The first official image from DC Studios’ upcoming Clayface is, on its surface, unremarkable. It shows a handsome young actor on the cover of a glossy magazine. He is smiling. The caption reads “Rising star Matt Hagen.” Nothing here screams danger. And that, of course, is entirely the point.
The Clayface movie 2026 is arriving as the third installment in James Gunn’s rebooted DC Universe, following Superman and Supergirl, and it is aiming for a very different emotional register than either of those films. Where the first two entries in the new DCU have leaned into the genre’s heroic and punk-rock flavors respectively, Clayface is positioning itself as a full-blooded R-rated body horror film. The first-look image — styled as an in-universe celebrity magazine spread cheekily captioned “A face you won’t forget” — is a careful piece of misdirection designed to establish who Matt Hagen is before everything goes catastrophically wrong.
Tom Rhys Harries plays the character. The Welsh actor has steadily built a compelling resume through Suspicion, Netflix’s Jekyll and Hyde, and Guy Ritchie’s The Gentleman, and his casting here draws on that facility for playing characters whose controlled exterior conceals something far more volatile. In this version of the story, Hagen is a struggling actor — the specifics of his disfigurement and transformation involve a gangster and an experimental scientific procedure — who ends up with the ability to reshape his own face and body like clay. It does not appear to be a particularly pleasant ability to have.
CinemaCon footage gave attendees early glimpses of what to expect from the Clayface movie 2026, and the reports coming out of that screening are not for the faint of heart. Harries’ Hagen is shown in a hospital bed with his face heavily bandaged following a violent attack. The transformation sequences apparently lean hard into practical body-horror imagery. In one reportedly stomach-turning moment, Hagen wipes his entire face away. The tone being described is less comic book adventure and more existential nightmare — psychological and visceral in equal measure.
The film is directed by James Watkins and written by Mike Flanagan, a pairing that promises a particular kind of precise, dread-filled storytelling. Gunn has spoken publicly about the script’s quality — noting that Clayface was not originally planned for a standalone film until the writers “turned in a script and it’s one of the best scripts that we’ve read.” That kind of unsolicited praise from a studio head tends to mean something.
This particular version of the character draws primarily from the beloved Batman: The Animated Series portrayal of Matt Hagen as a working actor, rather than earlier comic incarnations of the villain as a serial killer named Basil Karlo. That interpretive choice grounds the story in something recognizable and tragic before the horror elements take over.
The Clayface movie 2026 is currently scheduled for an October 23, 2026 release — Halloween season, which is either a confident statement of genre identity or the most obvious scheduling decision in recent memory, or possibly both. Lynn Harris and Chantal Nong serve as executive producers. Warner Bros. Discovery is distributing domestically, positioning the film as proof that Gunn’s DC Universe can accommodate genuine darkness alongside its more colorful heroics. Given the early reaction to the CinemaCon footage, that case appears to be made.
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