When DC Studios announced its slate of movies and TV shows at the start of 2023, The Brave and the Bold generated a lot of excitement among DC fans. Billed as a Batman and Robin movie revolving around Bruce Wayne and his son Damian, it sounded like something completely new for the Caped Crusader on screen.
James Gunn and Peter Safran have since admitted that they've struggled with how to introduce a new Batman, something likely made harder by a rival franchise like The Batman delivering an acclaimed hit like The Penguin ahead of The Batman Part II's 2028 release.
Gunn has since suggested that The Brave and the Bold has received a creative overhaul, likely meaning it will abandon the idea of glossing over Dick Grayson, Jason Todd, and Tim Drake. That's won the approval of fans, and following Batman's shadowy cameo in Creature Commandos, the new Clayface movie pulls back the curtain on the new Gotham City.
What we didn't expect was a Gotham that's so...bland. It looks like any American city, with no discernible skyline or landmarks; there's a lot of trash strewn across the streets and a nondescript skyscraper with "GCPD" emblazoned on the side, but that's it.
Could filmmaker James Watkins not sit down with Gunn, Safran, and The Brave and the Bold director Andy Muschietti to figure out what the DCU's Gotham would look like? Gunn has final say on all these movies and TV shows, so why wasn't he making the call? He cast Supergirl without any input from her movie's director, after all.
Tim Burton's Gotham featured gothic, Art Deco-inspired buildings. Joel Schumacher's turned it into a neon spectacle. Christopher Nolan created a claustrophobic urban infrastructure. The DCEU went down the industrial route, while Matt Reeves returned to a more stylised Gotham. Even Joker embraced the economically troubled New York of the late 1970s and early 1980s.
Clayface, on the other hand, delivers a bland, forgettable "just another city" take on Gotham that ends up being oddly fitting for a movie that delivers the most basic take on actors and gangsters imaginable (it would have benefited from taking its cues from Wonder Man and The Penguin).
There's still time to change Gotham. It needs to be changed, because if this is it, then it's impossible to imagine any version of Batman protecting these soulless streets.
In our review, we concluded, "Tom Rhys Harries shines in Clayface, an uninspired and unoriginal movie that's too light on horror and lacking in comic book personality to be anything but forgettable. It should have been a game-changer for the genre; instead, it's DC's Morbius moment."
Clayface will be released in theaters on October 23.