Clayface Opens at No. 1 as A24 Documentary Grows in Its Second Weekend

A comic book villain and an unusual documentary led a busy weekend at movie theaters, according to studio estimates released Sunday.

“Clayface,” from DC Studios and Warner Bros., opened in first place with an estimated $24 million in ticket sales in the United States and Canada, according to the Associated Press and The Hollywood Reporter. The R-rated film, built around a longtime Batman villain, played in about 3,450 theaters and added roughly $19 million overseas, for a worldwide start of about $43 million, according to the AP and Deadline. Its reported production budget is about $44 million.

The opening was respectable for a relatively modest budget but, according to The Hollywood Reporter, landed slightly below the studio’s own pre-weekend expectation of $25 million to $30 million, a projection the paper could not independently confirm.

The bigger story may be in second place. “You Can See Everything,” a documentary from A24 directed by Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim, took in an estimated $19.5 million in its second weekend, according to the AP, The Hollywood Reporter, Variety and Deadline. That was up about 23 percent from its opening weekend, according to TheWrap, an unusual pattern in an industry where most films lose a large share of their audience in week two.

The increase followed an expansion from 855 locations to about 2,655, according to the AP. The film opened with about $15 million and has now earned roughly $45.1 million in North America in two weekends, the AP and The Hollywood Reporter reported.

One box office analyst quoted by the AP called it a film that has caught the public mood around money, dreams, truth and reality. Documentaries rarely reach numbers like these in theaters, which makes its second-weekend growth stand out even more.

Not every new release fared well. Laika’s stop-motion animated film “Wildwood” opened in third place with an estimated $11.8 million, according to the AP, which noted its budget of about $100 million makes profitability a challenge. Taika Waititi’s “Klara and the Sun” drew only about $725,000 from roughly 880 theaters, according to the AP and Deadline.

Weekend figures are studio estimates and are usually revised when final numbers come in on Monday. Even so, the weekend offered a familiar lesson for Hollywood: a well-known character can deliver a solid opening, but word of mouth can still lift a film no one expected to compete.

Both of the top two films were made for modest sums by blockbuster standards, a reminder that a film does not need a nine-figure budget to lead the weekend.