DC Studios has failed to get The Brave and the Bold off the ground after announcing it at the start of 2023. The plan for that movie is to follow Bruce Wayne as he trains his newly discovered 10-year-old son, Damian, as the new Robin.
The implication there seems to be that the Bat-Family already exists, and if James Gunn is following the comics, Dick Grayson, Jason Todd, and Tim Drake should have all served as the Dark Knight's sidekick. Dick and Jason, however, will be paired up as two Robins in the animated Dynamic Duo (which is expected to be an "Elseworlds" title).
New photos from the set of Clayface reveal a poster for the Flying Graysons, the travelling family of acrobats, who work for Haly's Circus.
The group consisted of husband-and-wife team John and Mary Grayson, plus their son Dick, who is taken in by Bruce after the teenager's parents are gunned down. As Batman's ward, he's trained as the hero's first sidekick, Robin.
This poster doesn't look over a decade old, suggesting Clayface either takes place in Gotham City's past or that Dick is still part of the Flying Graysons at this point. If so, that really muddies the waters of the DCU's timeline, and who should be Robin.
We'll have to wait and see what happens there, but other photos seem to indicate that we'll visit Ace Chemicals, the iconic Gotham City location that saw Red Hood fall into a vat of chemicals, which transformed him into The Joker.
Could the mysterious substance that turns actor Matt Hagen into "Clayface" have ties to Ace Chemicals? That's another "TBD" element of this movie, and the pressure is on DC Studios to make sure Clayface satisfies fans eager to learn more about the DCU's Batman.
You can take a closer look at these new photos from the UK set of Clayface in the X posts below.
Promoting Superman, Gunn was asked why Clayface was brought into the DCU rather than being an Elseworlds title. "Well, I think it was just we needed DCU content," the Superman director admitted. "Mike Flanagan is somebody who I've been friendly with for a long time, and he wrote me about Clayface. He texted me about it really early on in my DC journey."
"Just being honest, I did not think that was something that was going to happen, but he came in and he pitched the idea and I was like, "Oh s---! That's cool." It's a body horror movie," Gunn teased. "It's a horror movie that, like any cool body horror movie, just happens to be in the DCU. And then he wrote the script, and the script was fantastic. We did not plan to do Clayface."
The cast of Clayface will be led by newcomer Tom Rhys Harries, with Eddie Marsan, Max Minghella, and Naomi Ackie set to join him in undisclosed roles. The movie, written by Mike Flanagan and Hossein Amini, and directed by James Watkins, is set to arrive in theaters on September 11, 2026.