DC’s New Near-Perfect Thriller Officially Defeats the Year’s Highest-Rated Movie With #1 Debut

You Can See Everything, the Elizabeth Holmes documentary Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim spent years shooting largely in secret, has now put together two weekends that feel a little hard to ignore. It delivered the biggest opening for a non-music documentary since 2004 on fewer than 900 screens, climbed to 98% on Rotten Tomatoes, and has people at least entertaining the idea that a documentary could push into the Best Picture race in a real way. Under normal circumstances, a movie like that expanding to more than 2,600 theaters in the same weekend as a new DC release would just be a side note to the bigger blockbuster story. In the end, though, a DC movie beat You Can See Everything.

DC’s Riskier Box Office Bet Just Paid Off

Clayface took No. 1 with an estimated $24 million from 3,458 theaters, per studio estimates on Sunday, while the A24 documentary grew 25% in its first full wide weekend to $19.5 million and a $45.1 million domestic total. Box office analyst David A. Gross captured why the runner-up is arguably the bigger industry story, noting that “A24 invested a reported $7 million in an interesting but complicated idea without a beginning, middle or end, that’s turned into a zeitgeist film about money, dreams, truth and reality” (via ABC).

A documentary out-grossing most of 2026’s star vehicles on a $7 million budget is the kind of result studios will probably pay attention to, especially since it posted a higher per-theater average than Clayface despite playing in roughly 800 fewer locations. None of which should take much shine off what DC Studios pulled off, because Clayface was its own kind of experiment. James Watkins’ film, built from a story by Mike Flanagan with a screenplay credited to Flanagan and Hossein Amini, is a body horror picture that happens to carry DC branding, with Tom Rhys Harries as Matt Hagen, an actor whose desperate bid to repair his ruined face transforms him into something that can no longer hold its own shape.

Clayface Won The Weekend, But You Can See Everything Stayed Close

Matt Reeves produced alongside James Gunn and Peter Safran, and crucially the budget came in around $44 million, which reframes everything about the number. A $24 million start would have been a disaster for Supergirl, which opened to $37 million in June and was broadly judged a flop against its far heavier costs. For a film priced like a Blumhouse project, the same figure looks like a path to profit, especially with an A- CinemaScore that is unusually strong for horror and a 94% audience score suggesting decent legs. Critics landed at 75%, with the Rotten Tomatoes consensus reading:

“Carving out a unique identity for itself in the DCU while closely resembling a litany of body horror classics, Clayface takes time to get going until it eventually morphs into an icky and satisfying revenge thriller.”

There’s a reasonable argument that this weekend sketched out where the comic book genre might be heading after years of diminishing returns. Villain spin-offs have been a graveyard lately, with Madame Web and Kraven the Hunter opening to $15.3 million and $11 million respectively, and Clayface nearly matched both of those debuts combined by treating the character as a horror premise rather than a franchise obligation.