With just one movie released so far, James Gunn’s vision of the DCU is certainly taking a more unpredictable direction than the straightforward assembly of the Avengers that Phase 1 of the MCU gave us. Prior to last year’s successful Superman, there’s been exactly one season of the animated Creature Commandos series, and after Superman came the second season of Gunn’s Peacemaker series, a show that debuted at the tail end of the previous DCEU only to be folded into the franchise’s new direction. Now there’s Supergirl and Lanterns on the horizon, with the Superman sequel Man of Tomorrow arriving in July of 2027. And yet the overarching narrative connecting the first chapter of the DCU Gods and Monsters, hasn’t quite revealed itself yet.
Now there’s another film fast approaching that promises to complicate things even more: Clayface. A standalone villain origin story in the vein of Todd Phillips’ Joker, the story of Clayface was pitched by horror film veteran Mike Flanagan back in 2023 (he wasn’t able to direct due to his work on the upcoming Exorcist film and Carrie streaming series), and by February of 2025 it was an official project slated to be directed by filmmaker James Watkins based on a screenplay by Flanagan and Drive screenwriter Hossein Amini. Clayface has had a strange journey to the screen; for a while, it was unknown whether or not the film would be a part of Matt Reeves’ The Batman continuity, a part of the DCU, or a total standalone film, but now we finally have an answer – one that just happens to raise a few more questions.
