Hideo Kojima likens DC’s body horror addition, Clayface, to the titans of the genre. When it comes to celebrating visionary filmmaking and dark, visceral storytelling, legendary game creator Hideo Kojima is never shy about sharing his immaculate pop-culture obsessions. Known for his deep appreciation of cinematic art and surreal genre pieces, the auteur has turned his discerning eye toward one of the most surprising comic book adaptations of the year so far.

Comparing its gruesome aesthetic and metamorphic terror to the absolute royalty of classic Hollywood body horror, Kojima is officially hyping up a dark DC villain transformation that promises to push cinematic boundaries further than ever before.

Hideo Kojima’s glowing remarks on Clayface

James Gunn and Peter Safran’s daring, uncompromised gamble with an R-rated take on Clayface has already managed to captivate one of the most celebrated auteurs in video game history. Hideo Kojima, the mastermind behind cinematic epics like Metal Gear Solid and Death Stranding, is notoriously vocal about his voracious appetite for film, and his stamp of approval carries serious weight across both the gaming and cinematic landscapes. Taking to X (Twitter) to share his thoughts on the feature, Kojima showered the film with praise.

“I watched Clayface. I wasn’t aware of Clayface’s existence in DC, but I enjoyed it,” Kojima said about the movie.

Diving deeper into his critique, Kojima linked the DC villain’s cinematic outing to the speculative sci-fi tales that defined his youth, expressing a lifelong soft spot for narratives centering on isolated men warped into grotesque shapes by botched experiments, freak accidents, or medical mishaps. He explicitly aligned the film with mid-century horror milestones like Richard Matheson’s The Shrinking Man, David Neumann’s The Fly, and 4D Man.

Each of these classics shares a thematic DNA of scientific alteration slowly isolating a protagonist from humanity, a tragic trajectory that mirrors Hagen’s own descent into monstrosity. Naturally, he also placed the movie squarely in the modern visceral canon, observing that as far as genre filmmaking goes, comparisons to David Cronenberg’s The Fly remake and Coralie Fargeat’s recent blood-soaked sensation The Substance are practically inevitable in his X post.

Kojima certainly is not shouting into an empty theater; moviegoers have turned out in droves for DC’s bold attempt.

Clayface manages to win over the audience as well

Driving the R-rated feature straight to the top of the domestic box office charts with a stellar $24 million opening weekend, audiences have declared their love for Clayface. Powered by a modest $40 million production budget, the grim comic book adaptation has already racked up an impressive $68 million globally, proving that commercial viability and dark genre storytelling can happily coexist. If reviewers were generally impressed by the gothic experiment – awarding it a solid 77% on Rotten Tomatoes – general ticket buyers practically showered it in praise, handing the film a soaring 94% audience approval rating.

That massive score places it shoulder-to-shoulder with Obsession as the highest-rated horror crowd-pleaser of 2026. Toss in a rare A- CinemaScore usually reserved for heavyweight blockbusters like Superman and The Batman, and it is crystal clear that audiences are hungry for unbridled scares. As James Gunn and Peter Safran continue building out the foundational bricks of the DCU’s Gods and Monsters era, this blood-soaked victory confirms that fans are more than ready for a trip to the darker side of the comic book spectrum.

Would you watch Clayface after Hideo Kojima’s high praise for the movie? Do let us know.