Clayface Earns a Rare A- CinemaScore — the Highest Grade for Any Body-Horror Film, Tied With Superman for Best in the DCU

Critics gave Clayface a mixed 77% on Rotten Tomatoes, but the people who actually paid to see it opening weekend responded very differently.

Clayface opened October 23, 2026 with $9.5 million on its first day, including $3.5 million from Thursday preview screenings, putting the film on track for a projected $23-25 million domestic opening weekend. Combined with an estimated $20-25 million from international markets, the film could debut globally around $40-50 million against a reported $44 million production budget — a real shot at breaking even in its first weekend alone, a notably stronger outcome than the soft tracking numbers that had circulated before release.

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The CinemaScore is the real headline

The more striking number isn't the box office — it's the A- grade Clayface received from CinemaScore, the exit-poll service that measures how opening-night audiences actually felt about a movie, as opposed to critics. That grade is being described as a record for a body-horror release, a genre that rarely earns top-tier audience grades given how deliberately uncomfortable it's designed to be. It's also tied with last year's Superman for the single highest CinemaScore of any DC Universe release under the current slate — a notable result for what was positioned internally as DC's smaller, riskier, R-rated horror experiment rather than a tentpole.

A real gap between critics and audiences

That A- lands awkwardly next to Clayface's critical reception. The film holds a 77% Tomatometer score from critics, a mixed-to-positive grade reflecting genuine critical disagreement over whether the body horror is bold enough or too restrained. Audiences on Rotten Tomatoes, by contrast, have rated it 94% positive from more than 1,000 verified ratings — a sizable gap between the people reviewing it professionally and the people who bought a ticket opening weekend. That kind of split usually means one of two things: either critics are holding the film to a different standard than general audiences care about, or the marketing set different expectations than what critics walked in with — and with Clayface, both read as plausible given how much pre-release coverage focused on the film's body-horror elements specifically.

How this compares to other October horror openers

Clayface's opening lands in a reasonable range for the October horror corridor — ahead of risk but not a breakout in the way a true word-of-mouth hit would be. For comparison, recent mid-October genre releases Smile and Black Phone 2 opened to $22.6 million and $27.2 million respectively, putting Clayface's projected $23-25 million squarely in that same band rather than standing out above or below it.

What this means going forward

An A- CinemaScore is historically a strong predictor of how a film holds up after opening weekend — audiences who like a movie enough to grade it that highly tend to generate the word-of-mouth that slows a film's weekend-to-weekend box office decline, which matters more for a horror-adjacent release than a quick opening pop. If that pattern holds, Clayface's second and third weekends are worth watching for whether the audience score translates into unusually strong legs for a DC Universe release — the kind of outcome that would do more for the film's ultimate profitability than the opening weekend number by itself.

Original coverage: Clayface Earns A- CinemaScore, Opens to $9.5M Day One