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
Ten days since the last Offworld sweep, it is Halloween, and the in-tray looks like the aftermath of an over-ambitious trick-or-treat round: lots of wrappers, one or two things that move on their own. The headline stories have already had their own pieces, so what follows is everything we haven’t covered, starting with the film that was meant to be this year’s DC punchbag.
Film: Clayface Oozes To The Top
When we last left Clayface, he was being kept at arm’s length by his own screenwriter and reviewed by a man who wasn’t supposed to be allowed. He has since opened, and the result is rather awkward for the doom-mongers. The R-rated DC Studios horror took first place in North America with around $24 million from 3,458 screens, and roughly $43 million worldwide once the overseas openings were added. It was reportedly made for about $44 million, which in superhero money is what you find down the back of the sofa.
The numbers that will make the studio happiest are the other ones. Rotten Tomatoes has it Certified Fresh at 75% from critics, with a 94% audience score, and CinemaScore gave it an A-, the same grade as The Batman and Superman. Reports say that makes it the best-reviewed solo villain film on the site, with Joker trailing at 68%. So the “DC’s Morbius moment” review that started the embargo row, two and a half stars from a man with a paid ticket, turns out to have been the grumpy end of a mostly warm reception. It is still no Superman-sized hit, and the second weekend, which happens to be Halloween weekend with no big new rival in sight, will tell us whether the goo holds its shape. After Supergirl fizzled, though, a cheap, nasty body-horror film that people actually like is a pleasant change of diet for Warner Bros.
Further down the chart, Laika’s stop-motion fantasy Wildwood opened in third with about $11 million, beating tracking that expected it to make under $10 million, while Olivia Colman and Alexander Skarsgård’s Wicker took a modest $5.75 million. Not bad for a film in which, as far as we can tell, nobody is burned alive in a giant wooden man. Yet.
Television: A Witch, A Multiverse And A Finale
AMC+ gave Halloween week its own witch. Yaga, a Crave original that arrived in the US on 23 October with two episodes, reimagines Baba Yaga as a contemporary mystery set in a small coastal town, with the old crone of Slavic folklore (and, more recently, of a certain assassin’s dog-related grudge) reborn as something altogether more fashionable. Kat Sandler created it, Carrie-Anne Moss plays a charismatic university professor with a taste for younger men, and Noah Reid, Clark Backo and Hudson Williams, fresh from Heated Rivalry, fill out the cast. It has eight half-hour episodes, a new one every Friday and a finale on 27 November. British viewers get it on Sky. The trailer sells it as foggy, autumnal and steamier than most things involving a hut on chicken legs, which is a low bar but a good one.
Over on Apple TV, the second season of Dark Matter reached its tenth and final episode, No Quiet Life, on Friday 30 October. Joel Edgerton and Jennifer Connelly are back for Blake Crouch’s multiverse thriller, which means that somewhere in the branching timelines there is a version of you who has already watched the finale and a version who is still waiting for the weekend. We haven’t seen it ourselves, so no spoilers, and no opinions, which in this magazine’s long history is a rare event.
Tabletop: Azeroth Rolls For Initiative
Wizards of the Coast is turning into the Dr Frankenstein of crossovers. With Magic: The Gathering already trekking through Starfleet, Dungeons & Dragons: World of Warcraft opens the new Universes Beyond line, with early access from 3 November and general release on 17 November. The 256-page hardback offers 11 new species, nine subclasses (six new, three revised), more than 50 monsters, 60-odd spells, 23 factions and seven Azerothian dungeons rebuilt for the tabletop, including the Deadmines, Shadowfang Keep and Onyxia’s Lair. Icecrown Citadel gets its own adventure for levels 16 to 20, so the Lich King will finally be defeated by a party that has argued for forty minutes about who carries the rope. There is a Star Wars book to follow in 2027. The delicious irony is that the Warcraft universe grew up borrowing heavily from early D&D, so this is less a crossover than a prodigal son being handed a hardback and a bag of dice.
Back in the real world, SPIEL Essen closed with a record 230,000 visitors, 10,000 more than last year’s record, and for the first time in its history it filled every hall at Messe Essen. The organisers say it is staying in Essen, which suggests a long-term solution of “squeeze”. A little less cheerful is the update on the great graded-card heist we mentioned in the last report. PSA now puts the haul at 6,451 cards, the FBI has joined the investigation, and the company has published the full list of stolen items by certification number, with compensation promised without waiting for the case to close. Police first put the value at about $963,000. The thieves are now in possession of what must be the best-documented stolen Charizards in history, and any fence who tries to sell one will be doing so to a roomful of collectors holding a printed checklist.
Books: Arcana, Algorithms And An Old Grudge
Yoon Ha Lee, whose Ninefox Gambit taught a generation of readers to fear a calendar, has a new novel out from 27 October. Code and Codex blends science fiction and fantasy, AI and arcana, which is also a fair description of the week’s group chat. Meanwhile Locus reports that new titles by Stephen Graham Jones and Christopher Buehlman each debuted on two of its bestseller lists, so horror is having a very good autumn in the shops even while the cinemas queue up for goo.
Finally, our daily brief from X noted that the only book-related buzz today was fans arguing about Harlan Ellison’s I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream. It is a story about a supercomputer that hates humanity so much it keeps five survivors alive in order to torment them. On a weekend when AI panic has sent viewers scurrying back to The Terminator, there is something pleasingly consistent about the internet reaching for the 1967 original instead. Happy Halloween. Here at SFcrowsnest, we’re staying in with the lights on.
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