If the embed above has oozed away down a Gotham drain, you can watch the Clayface trailer here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XOyhlkIMh3A
It has been ten days since the last Offworld sweep, and the in-tray has filled up the way a Tribble colony fills a grain silo. In that time a DC horror film has been reviewed, un-reviewed and argued over before most of the critics were allowed to say a word, Pennywise has booked himself a trip to the Great Depression, a comic has finally admitted what every alien in every pulp magazine already suspected about us, and somebody in Southern California has driven off with a lorry-load of cardboard which, if the wilder estimates are right, was worth more than a semi in Surbiton. Here is everything we haven’t already covered.
Top Of The Pile: Clayface Faces The Critics
DC Studios’ Clayface, which we met as a trailer last month, opens in UK, Irish and US cinemas on Friday, 23 October, and it has already had a more eventful fortnight than most films manage in a full theatrical run. After its Los Angeles premiere on 13 October, the studio let early viewers post short reactions, and they came back gushing: hard-R, gruesome, a breakout for Tom Rhys Harries as the disfigured matinee idol Matt Hagen, with comparisons to The Fly and Darkman flying about like loose prosthetics. For a film reportedly made for around $40 million, roughly the catering budget of a Marvel third act, that is a decent start.
Then, on Monday evening, ComicBookMovie’s Josh Wilding posted a full review, two and a half stars out of five, calling it “DC’s Morbius moment”. He had paid for a ticket to a public screening in the UK and, as he pointed out, had signed no embargo agreement to break. Rotten Tomatoes pulled the review anyway, the internet split into its usual two trenches, and a good many fellow critics came to his defence on the reasonable grounds that an embargo is a deal you strike in exchange for a free press screening, not a law of nature. Wilding says the review goes back up once the official embargo lifts today, Wednesday 21 October, at which point we will all find out whether he was the canary in the coal mine or the one man in the cinema who didn’t like the popcorn. Letterboxd users, meanwhile, have given it a respectable 3.7 out of 5 on debut.
Adding to the general sense of shape-shifting, the man who started it all is keeping his distance. Mike Flanagan, who wrote the original script and shares the screenplay credit with Hossein Amini, has been telling interviewers that the finished film is James Watkins’ movie, not his, and that he hasn’t even seen it yet. There is something rather fitting about a film about a man who can become anyone being disowned, defended and reshaped in public before it has sold a single ticket. Fans of Batman: The Animated Series‘ “Feat of Clay” will simply want to know how long the big gooey fellow is actually on screen, and on that point the leaks are unflattering and unconfirmed in equal measure. Friday will tell.
Television: Vision Goes Up, Pennywise Goes Back
Marvel’s VisionQuest, whose official trailer we covered at the start of the month, has landed on Disney+ with the kind of reviews the House of Ideas has been short of lately. It was Certified Fresh on Rotten Tomatoes at 87% when the embargo lifted on 12 October, slipped to 82% by the time the two-episode premiere went out, and has since climbed back up to 90% as more critics weighed in. Scores normally deflate after release like a week-old party balloon, so this one going the other way is worth noting. Paul Bettany and James Spader’s Ultron are getting the warmest notices, and much of the credit is going to showrunner Terry Matalas, who has now rescued 12 Monkeys, Picard and a synthezoid, and should probably be put in charge of something with a warp drive again.
HBO renewed It: Welcome to Derry back in August, but this week brought the first real progress report. Showrunner Brad Caleb Kane, doing the rounds for the Friday the 13th prequel Crystal Lake, says the scripts are about halfway written, Andy Muschietti is casting, and filming starts in summer 2027. The second season jumps back twenty-seven years to 1935 and the Great Depression, building to the massacre of the Bradley Gang, the bank robbers who stop in Derry to buy ammunition and meet something worse than the local constabulary. Muschietti has said the inspiration was the real Brady Gang, gunned down on the streets of Bangor, Maine, in 1937, which is the sort of footnote Stephen King must be delighted to see promoted to a whole season.
As for the clown, Kane told Deadline to expect “a different kind of Pennywise”, and told the New York Post it would be “the same old Pennywise”. Having it both ways, smiling from a storm drain while promising you a balloon, is about as in-character as a showrunner can get. Allowing for post-production, a premiere in late 2027 or early 2028 looks likely.
Film: Witches, Rivers And Something Nasty On The Bank
Walt Disney Animation’s 65th feature, Hexed, has put out its final trailer ahead of a Thanksgiving release, which means 25 November in the US and 27 November here. Hailee Steinfeld voices Billie Doe, an impulsive teenager who discovers she is a witch and gets flung out of suburbia into the witch realm of Hexe, with Rashida Jones as her cautious mother, Alice, who has been hiding the family talent since Billie was in nappies. Jodie Foster makes her Disney Animation debut as the villainous Queen Celeste, Henry Winkler plays a potoo bird called Nigel, Dan Stevens plays a pompous royal councillor, and Tracey Ullman and Stephen Fry are also in the mix. But the casting of the year, possibly the decade, is Walton Goggins as Beef Roger Crummchuk, a reclusive three-eyed magical cat. There is also a sequence of Billie dancing with enchanted broomsticks, which is either a loving nod to Mickey’s worst day at work in Fantasia or a reminder that Disney never throws away a good mop. The film has changed considerably since it was announced as a boy-and-his-mum story at D23, and the studio badly needs an original hit, so a lot is riding on that cat.
Rather less family-friendly is River, Joshua Giuliano’s debut slasher, which opened Midnight Madness at Toronto last month and promptly sold to Universal and Blumhouse Atomic Monster, reportedly for $10 million. Jane Levy (Evil Dead) and Jessica Rothe (Happy Death Day) play estranged sisters who take their younger brother (Max Mattern) out on a remote river to scatter their father’s ashes. The boat dies, the phones have no signal, and there is a masked man (Dane DiLiegro) standing on the bank, watching. Think Three Men in a Boat rewritten by Tobe Hooper, with no dog and considerably more stabbing. It sits at 94% on Rotten Tomatoes off the back of its festival screenings, was originally set up as a Shudder Original before Universal came knocking, and opens in US cinemas on 15 January 2027. Two of modern horror’s sturdiest final girls in one canoe seems almost unsporting to the killer.
Comics: Humanity, The Space Orcs
Every so often the internet rediscovers the old joke that, compared to the polite aliens of most space opera, humans are the galaxy’s orcs: loud, stubborn, unkillable and prone to bonding with anything that has a face. DC has turned it into a six-issue Elseworlds. Green Lantern: Doomed Cosmos, from London-born writer Dan Watters and artist Kyle Hotz, imagines a universe where the Empire of Humanity has spent centuries conquering the cosmos planet by planet, and only a heavily militarised Green Lantern Corps stands in its way. Hal Jordan, betrayed by his battle-brother Oliver Queen and left for dead on an alien world, has been rescued and deprogrammed by the Corps, and is now the only human fighting on its side against his own species.
Online, readers have already started calling it DC’s answer to Warhammer 40,000, and with an Imperium of Man doing the conquering it’s not hard to see why. Dan Brown colours, Steve Wands letters, and there are variant covers from Björn Barends, Steve Beach and Ashley Wood, with a foil edition from Barends for the slab-and-bag brigade. Issue one arrives on 20 January 2027. Older readers will remember that Elseworlds has already handed the ring to Bruce Wayne in 1994’s Batman: In Darkest Knight, so Hal can at least console himself that he has been replaced before.
Anime And Manga: Golden Spin, Alien Lodgers
VIZ Media will publish JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure: Part 8 – JoJolion in English, with volume one due in summer 2027 as a deluxe hardcover with colour pages, the same treatment it gives Steel Ball Run, which has been one of the best-selling manga in American comic shops this year while its anime streams on Netflix. The rest of VIZ’s summer 2027 slate is a peculiar delight, including an all-in-one film comic of Miyazaki’s Howl’s Moving Castle, a Dandadan character guide, a complete Kamisama Kiss box set and a Hideo Kojima book called The Gifted Gene: 70% of My Body is Made of Movies. Anyone who has sat through the cutscenes in Metal Gear Solid 4 will assume the other 30% is also movies.
Kō Sawada’s Yumene Connect, serialised in Kodansha’s Weekly Shōnen Magazine since September 2024, is getting a TV anime from Studio Massket, directed by Sōta Yokote, with Yu Sasahara as Nano and Yusuke Kobayashi as Yuhi Takamiya. Yuhi is a first-year who misses his entire first week of high school with a fever and comes back friendless; Nano is a well-meaning alien who arrives with a bag of baffling gadgets to help, and moves in, followed by a second extraterrestrial called Nyoru Puppu Panpippi. Alien girl moves in with hapless boy is a formula Lum has been running since Urusei Yatsura in 1978, though this one is, by every account, considerably steamier. Sawada’s own first reaction to the adaptation offer was to ask whether it was “really okay”. A Weekly Shōnen Magazine gag manga that makes its own creator nervous is not something you see every season.
And for anyone who hasn’t noticed the thudding coming from the lounge, Cyberpunk: Edgerunners 2 arrived on Netflix on 20 October. Ten new episodes from Trigger and CD Projekt Red, four new misfits, and the usual Night City life expectancy.
Games: Stranded Freighters, Argentine Nightmares And A Pixel Crystal
Wrong Organ’s Mouthwashing, the cult psychological horror about the dying crew of a stranded space freighter and their maimed captain, Curly, finally reaches consoles on 29 October. It arrives digitally on PS5, PS4, Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One, Switch and PC via the Microsoft Store, and it’s a day-one Game Pass title, confirmed at the ID@Xbox showcase on 20 October. Physical editions for PS5 and Switch from Fangamer are still coming, just later. The console versions were originally promised for 2025, which makes the delay rather apt for a game about a crew waiting for a rescue that never arrives. If you haven’t played it on PC, go in knowing as little as possible and avoid the birthday cake. The same showcase confirmed that the paranoid door-answering horror No, I’m Not a Human reaches Xbox in 2027.
New Blood Interactive, the publisher of DUSK and ULTRAKILL, released Tenebris Somnia on 16 October across PC (Steam and GOG), PS5, Xbox Series, Switch and Switch 2. Made by Argentine filmmaker Andrés Borghi and Saibot Studios, with FAITH‘s creator Airdorf as executive producer, it is a survival horror in the spirit of Silent Hill and Resident Evil, squashed into 8- and 16-bit pixel art. Julia goes looking for her ex-boyfriend and ends up trapped in a parallel nightmare, and at key moments the game cuts away to live-action sequences shot with real actors and practical effects, with the publisher stressing that no generative AI was involved. Those of us old enough to remember the full-motion video boom of Night Trap and Phantasmagoria will note that, this time, the acting is supposed to be frightening on purpose.
Tomorrow, 22 October, Square Enix and co-developer Lancarse release Final Fantasy Resonance on PS5, Xbox Series X|S, Switch, Switch 2 and PC, the first Final Fantasy done in the HD-2D style of Octopath Traveler and the Dragon Quest III remake. It rebuilds the first story arc of the mobile game Final Fantasy Brave Exvius as a proper turn-based console RPG, with airship commander Rain protecting the world’s crystals after the Earth Crystal shatters, and Cloud, Tidus and the Warrior of Light dropping in as summonable Visions. Sephiroth turns up as an optional challenge, because of course he does. Turning a gacha game into a full-price premium RPG reverses the industry’s usual direction of travel, which is rather refreshing. The demo has been out since September and its saves carry over. The Collector’s Edition costs $209.99, which is roughly what a PSA-graded Chocobo would set you back. Speaking of which…
Tabletop: Essen, Gobbos And The Great Cardboard Robbery
A FedEx vehicle carrying graded orders from PSA’s Southern California facility has been burgled, and collectors are now getting the email nobody wants. One creator, SKY-B, says a 104-card submission worth more than $100,000 has simply vanished, and Pokémon, Magic, Yu-Gi-Oh! and sports cards are all reported among the haul. PSA says it is working with FedEx and the police, and has been deactivating the certification numbers of the stolen slabs so they can’t be passed off as legitimate. Claims online that the total runs past $1 million are speculation for now. Somewhere, a fence is staring at a crate of plastic-encased Charizards and wondering how on earth he is meant to move them. It’s the Great Train Robbery for the booster-pack generation, except Ronnie Biggs never had to worry about corner wear.
Thankfully, most cardboard is heading somewhere happier this week. SPIEL Essen, the world’s biggest public board game fair, opens at Messe Essen tomorrow and runs until Sunday, 25 October, with organisers expecting up to 230,000 visitors, which would make it the largest edition yet. Among the attractions is a Warhammer 40,000 laser tag arena built with Games Workshop, for teams of up to 24, so you can finally find out whether you’d survive five minutes as a Guardsman (you wouldn’t). Peter Mohrbacher, the Magic: The Gathering and Angelarium artist, is this year’s official ambassador, and the brand-new TCG Awards, billed as the first global industry prizes for trading card games, have their premiere at the show.
Games Workshop, meanwhile, has started its annual Christmas campaign before the pumpkins are carved. Seven new Warhammer 40,000 Battleforce boxes were revealed on 19 October, including a veteran-heavy Space Marines Indomitus Task Force, an Ork Armoured Blitzmob, a Chaos Knights Helhunt Lance and the Necrons’ Disciples of the Nekrosor. Da Red Gobbo, the Orks’ festive mascot, returns riding a Squigmobile with a terrified assistant strapped in the sidecar, accompanied by a seasonal story, Da Red Gobbo’s Reckoning, by Callum Davis. Over in Warhammer: The Old World, the Tomb Kings of Khemri are rising again with new miniatures, which is the second most reliable thing in the hobby after Space Marines getting another box.
Wizards of the Coast has less cheery news for Trekkies. Production and shipping problems mean several Magic: The Gathering | Star Trek products will turn up late. Play Boosters and prerelease packs are on schedule for prerelease weekend on 6 November, but North America’s English-language Commander decks may not arrive until after the set’s 13 November tabletop release, and Europe gets it worst, with Collector Boosters, Commander decks, Scene Boxes and the splendidly named Beam Me Up Bundles all slipping. The set’s Beginner Box was already cancelled in September. As Scotty knew better than anyone, the trick is always to quote a longer schedule than you need.
For the armchair archaeologists, Penguin Random House published the 320-page Dungeons & Dragons Encyclopedia on 20 October, covering the Forgotten Realms, Dragonlance, Spelljammer, Ravenloft, Greyhawk and assorted monsters, villains and magic items. The writing team includes Matt Forbeck, Michael Witwer and Jon Peterson, whose Playing at the World remains the definitive history of the hobby’s birth, so this should be considerably more than a glossy tie-in. It’s also heavy enough to use as an improvised weapon. Call it 1d4 bludgeoning.
Books: Gentle Planets, Hungry Dragons
Becky Chambers’ new novel, As You Wake, Break the Shell, came out in the US from Harper Voyager on 13 October and reaches British shops in hardback on 29 October. It opens a new duology set on Fortune, a resource-poor colony world with a poisonous atmosphere, where a pilot called Cora quarries water while bonded to an alien creature, Colibri, and a reclusive botanist called Signy bio-prints medicine and bends the rules for people the system forgets. The bond is making Cora ill, and Signy is the only person who can help without costing her her licence. Publishers Weekly gave it a starred review. In a roundup that includes masked killers, body horror and an interstellar human empire, it is pleasant to report that Chambers is still writing science fiction in which the main danger is being kind at the wrong moment.
Fresh from winning Best Newcomer at the British Fantasy Awards in Glasgow (see our previous roundup), Annabel Campbell has her second novel out from Orbit. The Void Dragon continues the Shattered Lands trilogy begun in The Outcast Mage, with Naila fleeing dragonriders to the great library of Awasef while a hungry power grows inside her and the kingdom of Dahran slides towards civil war. Campbell lives near Lanark in a village where the sheep outnumber the people and, when not writing epic fantasy, works as a medical writer with a PhD in cardiovascular science, which presumably gives her an unfair advantage when describing what dragonfire does to the heart. It was published on 13 October, as was Claire North’s time-travel love story As We Fall Through Time, also from Orbit.
Finally, a nod to a veteran. Alan Dean Foster, the man who novelised Alien, ghost-wrote the original Star Wars novelisation and gave us 1978’s Splinter of the Mind’s Eye, the first Star Wars sequel anyone ever got to read, has a new SF novel out from Blackstone. Lost on Paradise was published on 20 October, and follows Jonos and Liina, who, like millions of others on a crowded, polluted Earth, dream of a better world called Paradise. Nearly fifty years after Luke and Leia went wading through the swamps of Mimban, Foster is still finding new planets to get people lost on. Some of us still have that paperback, the one with the Ralph McQuarrie cover and the slightly foxed pages, and we wouldn’t sell it to PSA for all the Charizards in California.
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