CLAYFACE Director Explains Why DC's Batman Villain Movies Succeed Where Others Fail

Making a movie about a comic book villain without the superhero around to fight them is a tricky business. Some have turned out great, while others have been complete disasters.

DC seems to have figured out what makes these stories work, and Clayface director James Watkins believes it comes down to giving audiences a character they can actually connect with.

We've seen DC find success with Joker and HBO's The Penguin, both of which took familiar Batman villains and explored what made them tick. Now, Clayface is taking a similar approach, but with a tragic body horror story about a man who loses everything and becomes the very thing he fears.

In an interview with ComicBook, Watkins explained why Matt Hagen's story appealed to him and what makes the character a compelling lead.

“I just think it’s that probably there’s a complexity to the characterization. That’s what appealed to me about Matt Hagen. It’s like this notion of this guy that’s, he’s, you know, he’s come from nowhere, he’s worked really hard to be who he is, and then he gets to a place, and then he has it all violently taken away from him, and I thought that was very relatable.”

The film follows Hagen, an aspiring actor who finally catches his big break after years of struggling to make it. Just when his career starts taking off, a mob boss has him brutally disfigured, destroying his appearance, livelihood, and everything he's worked to achieve.

It's a pretty devastating situation, and that's what makes his story interesting. Hagen isn't some criminal mastermind looking to take over Gotham City. He's a guy who wants his life back.

When he finally gets an opportunity to reclaim what he's lost, things go horribly wrong, and he transforms into a monster. The tragedy comes from watching someone desperately try to put his life back together, only to lose himself completely in the process.

That's a much more interesting character to follow than a villain who's simply evil because the story needs someone for the hero to punch. Of course, Hollywood has been trying to make standalone villain movies work for decades, with wildly different results.

DC's Catwoman was a notorious disaster, while Joker became a massive box office hit and earned major Academy Award recognition. Its sequel, Joker: Folie à Deux, struggled to capture that same success.

Then there's James Gunn's The Suicide Squad, which worked by throwing a collection of entertaining criminals into a situation where they had to act like heroes, whether they liked it or not.

The Penguin took another approach, turning Colin Farrell's Oswald Cobb into an ambitious underdog fighting his way through Gotham's ruthless criminal underworld.

Each project gave audiences a reason to follow characters who would normally be the bad guys in someone else's story. Sony, meanwhile, had a much tougher time pulling that off with its Spider-Man villain movies.

The Venom films found an audience thanks largely to their entertaining central character, but Morbius and Kraven the Hunter failed to connect with moviegoers. Both were box office disappointments, and Sony's attempts to build an entire franchise around Spider-Man villains ultimately fell apart.

The problem wasn't necessarily that these characters were villains. It was that their movies struggled to give audiences enough reason to care about them.

Watkins believes that getting people invested in the character's personal struggles is what makes all the difference.

“It’s just character and, you know, psychology and things that are relatable. So, when it’s well-drawn characters that have a little bit more going on, then I think that’s what makes it most, most interesting.”

That's what makes Clayface such an interesting addition to DC's growing collection of Batman villain stories. Matt Hagen isn't trying to become Gotham's next criminal kingpin, and he isn't looking to prove he's more powerful than Batman.

He's an actor who wants to reclaim the identity that was stolen from him, and his desperation eventually turns him into something horrifying. It's an approach that could make Clayface one of DC's more sympathetic monsters, even as his actions become increasingly difficult to defend.

A great villain movie doesn't need audiences to approve of what its main character does. It just needs them to understand why they're doing it.

That's what Watkins is aiming for with Clayface, and it could make for one hell of a tragic Batman villain story.