James Gunn Downplays What Those Clayface Set Photos Suggest About the DCU’s Gotham City

Over the past few weeks, photos from the Liverpool shooting locations of Clayface have been all over social media, providing glimpses of the first Gotham City to be depicted in the DCU. Fans and media outlets, including IGN, have made a meal over what the props and set decoration reveal about the DCU’s Gotham City.

For example, this map of Gotham City confirms that Wayne Manor, Wayne Tower and Wayne Industries apparently already exist in Clayface’s timeline.

Onlookers have snapped photos of The Wayne Community Center, caught references to the drug “bliss” from the HBO series The Penguin (which is not in the DCU), and Club Vesuvius,

Here’s a Gotham license plate, an homage to Clayface co-creator Bill Finger, and a nod to Batman artist Jim Aparo on this curious missing person poster.

But when I spoke to DC Studios co-chief James Gunn on Friday, he downplayed the significance of what those set decorations suggest about the DCU’s Gotham City.

IGN: We’re getting our first look at the DCU’s Gotham City in Clayface, and there’s a ton of those little Easter eggs in the set photos. How canon is some of that stuff? Like there’s a mention of Joker, there’s a Penguin Man poster. Should we take that background stuff as anything more than just background stuff?

James Gunn: You really have to take it as something that an art department put together because I never… First of all, there’s a couple of things that I don’t even think were on the set, like that bat insignia. I think somebody put that there afterwards. But I haven’t seen all those things, but they weren’t something that came across my desk.

And also, we have a guy, Phil, who is now in charge of the DCU Bible of keeping everything consistent and making sure that the cities are the same and the maps are the same and the celebrities are the same, all the stuff that they need to keep consistent. And I don’t think he’s OK’d all the art department stuff on that movie.

IGN: So all those maps of Gotham City, we can’t get our hopes up over?

James Gunn: I don’t think so. I don’t think so, no.

That Batman insignia that Gunn refers to is from 2022’s The Batman, which led some fans to speculate that Robert Pattinson’s Batman is in the DCU. But a comparison of the news vans and GCPD patrol cars from both films make clear they’re not in the same continuity. It’s coincidental that both Clayface and The Batman used Liverpool as their Gotham City.

The James Watkins-directed, Mike Flanagan-scripted body horror film Clayface – which stars Tom Rhys Harries. Naomie Ackie and Max Minghella – opens in theaters September 2026.

For more from my James Gunn interview, read his answers to our burning questions about Peacemaker Season 2’s “consequential” DCU cameo and why “things are in flux” for the Batman: The Brave and the Bold movie.