I wrote about Skydance’s new studio chiefs, A24’s fight with theaters and the $100M reparations musical from Trey Parker, Matt Stone and Kendrick Lamar that Paramount won’t release. I’m at matthew@theankler.com
In Hollywood’s superhero business, $150 million at the box office can be a disaster. Or wait, can it be a triumph? It turns out it all depends on how much you spend getting there.
DC chiefs James Gunn and Peter Safran are about to find out.
Their Supergirl fell from the sky this summer with a miserable $126 million worldwide, another expensive disappointment in a genre increasingly divided between billion-dollar juggernauts and box office bombs saddled with kryptonite.
BEFORE THE CLAY Tom Rhys Harries as Matt Hagen in Clayface, which turns a minor Batman villain’s origin story into body horror. Warner Bros. / Courtesy Everett Collection
Now, with David Ellison and Ynon Kreiz installed as their new Skydance bosses, Gunn and Safran are preparing to unleash something Hollywood hasn’t seen much of lately: a superhero movie that doesn’t require blockbuster status to break even.
Clayface, the R-rated body-horror movie about a little-known Batman villain — with no Batman, no marquee stars and no army of CGI artists — cost only around $30 million to make. That’s a rounding error compared with the nine-figure budgets Hollywood has come to accept as the price of admission to the superhero business.
And here’s the potential game-changer for both DC and Marvel’s hell-or-high-water economics: Clayface could gross about the same as Supergirl and be considered a success.
The strategy takes a page from horror, where studios have learned that audiences will turn out for unknown faces, terrifying stories and movies that cost a fraction of the average superhero spectacle (hello, $750,000-budget Obsession). And it may offer something DC — and Hollywood — desperately needs: a way to keep mining comic book IP without betting the studio (and the career of everyone involved) every time.
For Ellison, whose new entertainment empire is saddled with roughly $80 billion in debt, the timing couldn’t be better. But can a C-tier Batman villain really succeed where Hollywood’s biggest superheroes have failed? And what happens to the blockbuster business if he does?
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Comments
It’s a truism that nobody – literally nobody – sets out to make a bad film.
The problem is, most often, that the SYSTEM – driven in great part by the combination of vertical integration and quarter-by-quarter investor expectations – cannot afford the time/effort to make THE BEST versions of what they produce.
Every studio has spent at least a decade chasing the MCU phenomenon without accepting that the foundation of that success was built on a low-budget IRON MAN whose rights had recently shifted from New Line to Paramount*.
Did Universal emulate that with their (imo, possibly cool) idea to do an integrated classic-monster-focused “dark universe”? Reader, they did not.
And with the recent finalization of Skydance, I don’t imagine they or other studios will have the patience/risk-tolerance for CLAYFACE style experiments, even IF the movie does an OBSESSIONesque ratio of cost-to-return.
The system just isn’t currently constructed to allow that at any real scale.
If/when Skydance shatters under its debt load AND Netflix doesn’t absorb NBC/Universal AND there is a return to a more de-aggregated production environment where the studios focus on making hits instead of flywheel-spokes, maybe more CLAYFACEs and OBSESSIONS and even IRON MANs can happen.
I’m not holding my breath. YMMV.
*forgot to say that, yes, the 2008 INCREDIBLE HULK at Universal was a larger budget miss that has become the technical start-point of the MCU narrative, but had IRON MAN imploded, nothing further would likely have occurred with that trove of IP for a while.
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