Clayface is getting a facelift. Following last week’s report that the DC Studios movie is on track to begin filming this fall despite Luca Guadagnino’s Sgt. Rock movie being put in the reserves, TheWrap reports that Mike Flanagan’s Clayface script is getting a rewrite by the Oscar-nominated screenwriter of 1998’s The Wings of the Dove. Hossein Amini, who also wrote the Nicolas Winding Refn-directed Drive and the first and last episodes of the Star Wars series Obi-Wan Kenobi, is reportedly reshaping the feature about the shape-shifting Batman villain.
Videos by ComicBook.com
Flanagan, the creator of Netflix supernatural horror series The Haunting of Hill House and Midnight Mass, and the filmmaker behind The Shining sequel Doctor Sleep and upcoming Exorcist and Carrie reboots, pitched and penned the previous draft of the Clayface script.
RELATED: The Many Faces of Clayface, Explained
In February, DC Studios co-chiefs James Gunn and Peter Safran told ComicBook and other outlets that they gave Clayface the green light on “the strength of an exceptional screenplay.” Described as an R-rated body horror in the vein of David Cronenberg’s The Fly, Gunn has praised Flanagan’s script as “pure f—ing horror, and so real and true, and psychological, and body horror, and gross.”
Clayface is an “incredible body horror film that reveals the compelling origin of a classic Batman villain,” Safran said, adding that the character’s story “is equally resonant” and as “compelling, and in many ways more terrifying,” than those of fellow Batman villains Joker and Penguin, who have starred in their own mature-rated spinoffs.
“One of the things Peter and I talked about when we first got the [Clayface] script was, ‘If we were producing [DC] movies when we were doing Belko Experiment, and somebody had brought us this horror script called Clayface, about this guy, we would have died to have produced this movie,” Gunn said, nodding to the 2016 horror-thriller that Gunn wrote and co-produced with Safran. “Because [Clayface] was just a really excellent body horror script. And the fact that it’s in the DCU is just a plus.”
Plot details remain locked away in Arkham Asylum, but the character received top billing in the 2023 one-shot comic Batman: One Bad Day – Clayface. Set in Hollywood, aspiring actor Basil Karlo took the name “Clay” in his pursuit of movie stardom, but One Bad Day quickly turned into an Invasion of the Body Snatchers or The Thing-style horror story.
Clay consumed his victims, took their forms, and, as a shape-shifting serial killer, molded himself into everything from a more successful actor to a director to a movie studio head.
James Watkins (Speak No Evil) is attached to direct from Flanagan and Amini’s script, with Matt Reeves (The Batman) and Lynn Harris (the Blade movies) producing for DC Studios. Amini’s credits include the films Snow White and the Huntsman, 47 Ronin, Our Kind of Traitor, and The Snowman. He also co-created the AMC crime series McMafia with Watkins and penned episodes of the period crime drama The Alienist, about an investigation into a serial killer.
DC Studios has set Clayface to ooze into theaters on Sept. 11, 2026.
