UPDATE 9/1: The Quorum’s new eight-week chart has Clayface ahead of Street Fighter in interest — the IMAX movie opening one week before it.
The first tracking on Clayface is in — the survey data Hollywood uses to guess how a movie will open — and the numbers split in a direction you almost never see.
Fifty-seven days from its October 23 release, fewer people than usual know the Batman villain’s solo horror movie exists (a marketing fix, more on that below).
But the ones who do know? They’re planning to be there at nearly double the normal rate.
The last DC movie whose numbers split like this split the other way. It’s now the lowest-grossing DC movie ever made. Supergirl.
Fewer People Know It Exists — And They’re Twice As Committed
Box office analyst Brandon Katz shared the data from Greenlight Analytics, one of the research firms that polls moviegoers about upcoming movies.
Two numbers matter here, and both are simpler than they sound.
The first is awareness, which is exactly what it sounds like: how many people know the movie exists.
Clayface sits at 32% awareness. The four movies Greenlight uses as a measuring stick averaged 38% at the same point before they came out.
The second is opening weekend intent, which Greenlight measures among people who already know the movie exists.
In plain English: among people who already know Clayface exists, 21% say they plan to see it opening weekend — not later in theaters, not on streaming, but that first weekend. For the four movies Greenlight compared it against, only 11% of aware moviegoers said the same.
So the crowd that knows about Clayface is smaller than usual, but it’s almost twice as committed to showing up on day one.
Run the math on those two numbers and the committed group isn’t just more locked in — it’s bigger, period.
21% of a 32% aware crowd works out to about 7 of every 100 people surveyed planning to be there opening weekend. For the comparison movies, 11% of 38% is about 4 in 100.
Fewer people know Clayface exists, and it still has more people planning to show up.
As Katz put it: “Small audience, unusually locked in. Desire is there. It needs more reach.”
There’s also likely a reason the awareness number is low: the ads and marketing haven’t started.
In a follow-up, Katz pointed out that most movie marketing campaigns don’t really begin until about six weeks before release, with most of the money spent in the final three.
Clayface is still 57 days out. Warner Bros. hasn’t turned the machine on yet, and awareness this early mostly measures how loud the marketing has been.
Katz also replied to a fan who said Clayface is looking like another DC flop: “That’s not what this early tracking data suggests.”
His own verdict went further. It’s too early to call Clayface a hit or a bomb, Katz says, but eight weeks out, you’d rather have a small audience this locked in — with time left to build awareness — than the opposite: everyone aware, nobody committed.
He calls its early position solid.
Which leaves the other number. The one no amount of advertising can create.
Supergirl Had The Opposite Numbers, And They Killed It
CBN readers have seen this exact split before, pointed the other way.
Days before Supergirl opened in June, survey data from research firm The Quorum had it at 69% awareness after a 13-point jump in two weeks, the biggest of any movie being measured.
Warner Bros. threw everything at the final stretch (Superman, Lobo), and it worked: the whole country knew Supergirl was coming.
However, interest — the number measuring whether people actually wanted to see it — sat at 51%, behind every movie it had to share the summer with.
Everyone knew Supergirl existed. Not enough people wanted to go.
It opened to $37 million, lost its own opening weekend to Toy Story 5‘s second, and finished as the lowest-grossing DC movie in history. Supergirl is expected to lose the studio more than $240 million.
Here’s the part that matters for Clayface: Warner Bros. actually fixed Supergirl‘s awareness problem. Fans said they couldn’t find the marketing, the studio turned everything up to full blast, and awareness jumped 13 points in two weeks. But it changed nothing.
The missing ingredient was never awareness. It was desire, and no amount of advertising can create desire that isn’t there.
And one thing makes the comparison fair: it’s the same company doing the measuring. Greenlight bought The Quorum — the firm that tracked Supergirl — back in 2025.
The two surveys asked different questions (Supergirl‘s number measured general interest, Clayface‘s measures opening weekend plans), so the percentages still don’t line up side by side. The pattern does.
Supergirl had everyone’s attention and not enough people who cared.
Clayface has people who care and not enough attention, and only one of those problems has ever been fixed with an ad budget.
A $40 Million Horror Movie Can Win With These Numbers
The other reason this works: look at what Clayface actually is.
This is an R-rated body horror movie from Speak No Evil director James Watkins, written by Mike Flanagan, produced by Matt Reeves, made for around $40 million (rumors offer that Gunn had Zaslav shoehorn the flick into the DCU).
Horror movies don’t need the whole country to buy a ticket.
They make their money fast, on opening weekend, powered by fans who decided months ago they were going. That’s exactly the group Greenlight just measured, and for Clayface, that group is twice as committed as normal. And that’s something that could lead to big word of mouth.
Greenlight has seen this pattern before and described it the same way: urgency among the core fans before the general audience has shown up yet.
Supergirl cost $170 million to make and needed everyone. Clayface cost $40 million and needs its true believers to show up, then lets word of mouth do the rest.
Awareness will climb once the ads start; that happens on schedule for every movie.
The question money can’t answer is whether anyone would care about a Clayface movie led by newcomer Tom Rhys Harries.
Fifty-seven days out, the people who found it care more than the comparison movies’ fans ever did.
The number to watch from here is whether that 21% holds.
It won’t stay that high. The first people to find a movie are always its most eager, and the colder audiences the October ads reach never convert at the same rate. The real question is how much of that commitment survives as the crowd grows.
Supergirl never had enough enthusiasm to water down in the first place.
The stakes aren’t small, either.
Clayface is the second and final DC movie of 2026, landing while Paramount weighs what a DC shake-up would look like if it and Man of Tomorrow both come up short. Whatever number it posts on October 23 is going to get used by somebody.
Supergirl proved a studio can make the whole world aware of a movie it doesn’t want to see.
Clayface starts with the one thing Supergirl never had: people who already want to see it.
