Clayface Gets a New Poster Ahead of October 23 — What We Know About DC Studios' Body-Horror Movie

DC Studios head James Gunn shared a new official Clayface poster on September 14, 2026, with a caption that doubles as the film’s tagline: “Look fear in the face. #Clayface hits theaters this October.”

The new poster

The image splits a man’s face down the center — one half ordinary, lit and human, the other dissolving into thick, dripping red clay that curls down the rest of the poster around a small silhouette of a hooded figure standing over a city skyline. It’s the same “Look Fear in the Face” line used across DC Studios’ current marketing, a phrase Warner Bros. has now used across Superman, Supergirl and Clayface alike. This isn’t the film’s first-look material — Clayface already had a teaser and earlier poster art out from earlier in 2026 — but it’s the clearest, most fully-realized piece of key art for the film to date, confirmed for theaters October 23, 2026 in North America, with an international release beginning October 21, 2026, per Warner Bros.’ own distribution language.

What Clayface is actually about

Clayface follows Matt Hagen (Tom Rhys Harries), whose rise from a Gotham street kid to a Hollywood leading man is cut short when a local crime boss leaves him horribly disfigured. Abandoned by the people around him, Hagen turns to a cutting-edge experimental treatment that restores his face — but the treatment destabilizes both his body and his mind, sending him down a path of escalating, all-consuming revenge. That’s DC’s own framing, not an outside guess: this is a body-horror story about a man whose cure becomes his undoing.

Matt Hagen, not Basil Karlo

Worth being precise about, since the comics have used the Clayface identity for multiple characters over the decades: this film is built specifically around Matt Hagen, not Basil Karlo, the Clayface most casual comics readers may know best from other adaptations. Different writers have handed the Clayface name to different characters across Batman’s history: Karlo, Hagen, Preston Payne and others have all worn it at different points. This movie’s version is Hagen’s story, full stop.

Why DC is treating this as horror, not a comic book movie

James Gunn has repeatedly described Clayface as a genuine horror film rather than a conventional superhero adaptation, and DC Studios’ own marketing has leaned into that positioning consistently — the poster’s visual language owes more to body-horror imagery than to typical DCU key art. Director James Watkins (Speak No Evil) is working from a screenplay by Mike Flanagan and Hossein Amini, with Flanagan credited for the story as well — a horror-specialist creative team assembled deliberately, not incidentally.

Cast and creative team

Alongside Tom Rhys Harries as Matt Hagen, the currently confirmed cast includes Naomi Ackie, David Dencik, Max Minghella, Eddie Marsan, Nancy Carroll and Joshua James. Character names beyond Hagen himself haven’t been officially detailed in full, so this piece isn’t assigning roles DC hasn’t confirmed.

Is Batman confirmed?

No. A cameo from Robert Pattinson’s Batman was reportedly discussed during the film’s development — Naomi Ackie has said as much publicly — but it didn’t happen, and there’s no confirmed Batman appearance of any kind in Clayface. It’s also worth being clear about universes: Pattinson’s Batman belongs to Matt Reeves’ separate continuity, kept deliberately apart from Gunn’s DC Universe, which Gunn has said will introduce its own, different actor as Batman in a future DCU film. Reeves producing this film’s development slate doesn’t fold Clayface into his universe — DC Studios has never described it that way.

Current release status

Clayface is the DCU’s third theatrical film, dated for October 23, 2026 in North America and October 21, 2026 internationally, distributed by Warner Bros. Pictures. Nothing about that release plan has changed with this poster — the news here is the marketing, not a schedule shift.

For where Clayface fits into the wider DC Studios slate, see our DCU viewing order guide.