Matt Reeves says he and Mike Flanagan were developing ‘CLAYFACE’ before James Gunn and Peter Safran took over DC Studios. “After THE BATMAN, I was very excited about this idea. THE BATMAN was not a Batman origin story, but what it did—because it was his first appearance in the city—it was an entree into origin stories for the Rogues’ Gallery. After the movie, when we started working on the script for the next Batman, we began thinking it’d be really exciting to develop a bunch of stories that could be genre stories that related to the Rogues’ Gallery characters and explore their origins. And one of the things I got very excited about was the idea of looking for ways to do really cool, smaller horror films. And [Screenwriter] Mike Flanagan came to me and said he had been a huge fan of Clayface—especially the iteration that came from the animated series—and had a passion about doing a horror story with Clayface at the core. So, we started developing it. And as that story started coming together, becoming this sort of tragic love story—THE FLY meets this horror thriller—James [Gunn] and Peter [Safran] took over DC Studios, and that was one of the first things we pitched to them. They loved it so much, they wanted to make it one of the DCU movies. And we got very excited about the idea of taking this story into the DCU.” (via @BatmanNewsChris | batmannews.com/2026/10/13/ma…)