[COLUMN] Clayface Just Became the Most Important Superhero Film of 2026 | by Darren Mooney (Patreon)

It has been a rough couple of years for comic book movies at the box office.

Last year, the only superhero movie to earn more than $500m was Deadpool & Wolverine, and that was the first superhero movie since Spider-Man: No Way Home in 2021 to cross the billion-dollar mark. It’s been a long time since multiple superhero movies could cross that billion-dollar threshold in a single year, as they did in 2012, 2018 and 2019. This year, Captain America: Brave New World sputtered out at $415m and Thunderbolts* struggled to $382m.

This weekend saw a fairly seismic drop for Fantastic Four: First Steps, of roughly 66% in its second weekend. However, it isn’t just Marvel that is facing this problem. Although Sony budgets its superhero movies more carefully than its major competitors, it hasn’t been a particularly good couple of years for that brand either, with Morbius ($167m), Madame Web ($100m) and Kraven the Hunter ($62m) all underwhelming, while Venom: The Last Dance tapped out at $478m.

Even James Gunn’s Superman, the most successful superhero movie of the year, seems likely something of a wash. Much was made of how much Warner Bros. had riding on the film, although that pressure relaxed in the wake of successes like A Minecraft Movie and Sinners, but the point of reference was always Barbie. Superman is the character who codified the idea of the superhero. He is the flagship character – not of any particular company’s brand, but of the entire genre.

It is likely that Superman will finish around or just over $600m. This is lower than Zack Snyder’s Man of Steel from almost a decade ago, unadjusted for inflation. It will also put it lower than any superhero movie starring Bradley Cooper as a talking raccoon. There is a sense that expectations have consistently been revised down for Superman. Early reports suggested it had a “$700m to $900m break-even point”, with Gunn later insisting that figure was “complete and utter nonsense.”

Still, this marks a sharp decline for the larger genre. The highest-grossing superhero movie of 2021 earned $1.9bn. In 2022, that figure was $955m. In 2023, it was $845m. Allowing for the $1.3bn that Deadpool & Wolverine earned last year, there is a clear downward trend here. If Superman taps out around $600m, it will be the lowest-grossing top-ranking superhero movie of a given year since Thor back in 2011, allowing for the pandemic gap year of 2020. That’s not cause for celebration. That’s a warning.

Indeed, the generally positive coverage of the film’s box office seems a little disingenuous, given the suspicion that greeted the more modestly budgeted Sinners when it hit the same kind of numbers. Every box office headline around Sinners seemed to come with some caveat about how “profitability remains a long way off” or “profitability remains a ways away.” It appears that some films get the benefit of the doubt, and others don’t.

Sinners has almost certainly been more profitable for Warner Bros. than Superman, but did not receive the same benefit of the doubt. This is undoubtedly because Warner Bros. and the larger film industry has more riding on Superman. Sinners is not launching a shared universe. Sinners does not feature a cameo from a character who will anchor their own spin-off next June. The perception that Sinners is underperforming is less likely to tank the stock of several entertainment conglomerates.

The term “superhero fatigue” is perhaps a loaded one. It might be fairer to go with Chris Miller’s formulation “movie that feels like a movie I’ve seen a dozen times before” fatigue. James Gunn calls it “mediocre movie fatigue.” Whatever it is called, it is here. There was a time when audiences would go see anything with a cape or a set of tights in it, when an Ant-Man sequel could make $622m or an Aquaman movie could cross the billion mark. Those times are gone.

This is nothing to be afraid of. It is the nature of culture. Musicals and westerns dominated cinema in the middle decades of the 20th century, giving studios a license to print money. However, eventually those genres entered a decline. They didn’t go away entirely – westerns and musicals continue to be made to this day – but they no longer occupied the center of culture. The superhero movie has been the dominant form of summer blockbuster for the past seventeen years. It was a good run.

None of this is to suggest that superhero movies are destined to bomb forever. Next year will see the release of Spider-Man: Brand New Day and Avengers: Doomsday. These are big titles. Tom Holland’s Spider-Man is a huge draw; the only movie that he’s starred in to gross under $1bn was Spider-Man: Homecoming, and it took in $880m. Doomsday is a gigantic crossover built around the return of Robert Downey Jr. It would be reckless to assume that either or both will bomb.

Still, these are not sustainable long-term models for superhero blockbusters. Tom Holland can only make so many Spider-Man movies. While gigantic cameo-laden crossovers are fun, there is a sense that returns diminish over time. In 2019, Avengers: Endgame made $2.7bn. In 2021, Spider-Man: No Way Home made $1.9bn. In 2022, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness made $955m. Deadpool & Wolverine ticked back up to $1.3bn, but eventually you end up with The Flash.

History might not repeat, but it does rhyme. In the mid-1960s, 20th Century Fox was almost bankrupted by Cleopatra, a big studio picture that was such a folly that it was both the biggest movie of the year and a massive loss. At a time when the studio musical was in decline, Fox got incredibly lucky. They released The Sound of Music, an old-fashioned musical that – in defiance of market trends – became the highest-grossing movie of all time. It saved the studio.

The story does not end there. The smart thing for Fox to do, having recovered from a potential studio-destroying folly, would be to diversify its investments, to learn from its mistakes and to avoid putting so much money into so many risky bets. Instead, against every indicator in the larger market, the studio took the success of The Sound of Music as proof that it should be investing even more heavily in classical, old-fashioned musicals.

These musicals were disasters. In 1967, Doctor Dolittle was such a massive flop that it threatened to bankrupt the studio again. In 1968, Star! performed so poorly that the studio pulled it from theatres, cut half an hour from it, and re-released it the following year as Those Were the Happy Times. In 1969, the underperformance of the Barbra Streisand musical Hello, Dolly! was “the straw that broke Fox’s back” as the studio hurdled once again towards bankruptcy.

The lesson here is clear: an exceptionally good performance of an individual film within a genre in decline is likely, if not inevitable, but it also doesn’t prove anything beyond the success of that individual film. Einstein quipped that the definition of insanity is “doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.” It really does feel like the major studios need to keep this in mind as these superhero blockbusters become less and less financially reliable.

If the best-case performance for a medium-tier superhero movie lies around the $500m mark, then studios simply cannot continue producing four or five superhero films in a given year that cost around $200m each. Hollywood math dictates that films need to gross around 2.5 times their budget to break even, to cover distribution, publicity and participation costs. The cloth needs to be cut to fit the measure. These films need to start living within their means.

In this sense, the most important superhero film of next year is not Craig Gillespie’s Supergirl, Daniel Destin Cretin’s Spider-Man: Brand New Day, nor the Russo Brothers’ Avengers: Doomsday. It is James Watkins’ Clayface, a superhero film adapted from a screenplay by Mike Flanagan and starring Naomi Ackie and Tom Rhys Harries. It will be an R-rated superhero horror film based around a B-tier Batman villain without any flagship characters attached. It will also be budgeted at $45m.

Even if Brand New Day and Doomsday succeed, they are not sustainable models. Disney cannot keep paying Robert Downey Jr. $80m per film and giving him trailer encampments. At a certain point, gambling at that level will end in loss, the kind of loss that destroys a studio. In contrast, Clayface has no real downside and huge potential upside. Clayface simply needs to fit $112.5m to be profitable. If it somehow makes zero dollars at the box office, it will still lose less than The Marvels or The Flash.

Indeed, the obvious precedent for Clayface is Todd Phillips’ Joker from 2019, which grossed $1bn on a $55m budget. At a more modest price point, studios can take risks. Joker and Clayface did not need to be four-quadrant crowd-pleasing blockbusters in order to succeed. In some ways, this is what happened with those older populist genres. Westerns became grittier and edgier in the hands of European directors like Sergio Leone. The musical was reinvented in films like Cabaret and All That Jazz.

Clayface is a test of both studios and audiences. Can studios deliver a compelling, functional and satisfying superhero film on a reasonable budget that meets audience expectations? And, if they can, are audiences still interested in going to see a superhero film that is budgeted responsibly and in line with their appetite for the genre as a whole? If the answer to both questions is “yes”, then the genre’s future looks a lot brighter and more stable.

There is an old curse, often misattributed to Chinese philosophers: “may you live in interesting times.” These are certainly interesting times for the superhero genre. There is another mistranslation from Chinese, the familiar rhetorical cliché that the words “crisis” and “opportunity” are interchangeable. Whatever the origins of that factoid, the superhero genre is certainly in a state of crisis – but also one of opportunity. Can it adapt to the times? Can it change shape to fit into this new landscape?

Of the big superhero films next year, only Clayface is equipped to answer that question.