We Speak Financials
The Cheap Movie Won: DC’s Clayface Tops the Box Office on a $44 Million Budget
Hollywood’s math is flipping, and one weekend just proved it. DC Studios’ Clayface won the North American box office with an estimated $24 million opening. What makes that a win is the other number: the movie cost just $44 million to make, according to The Hollywood Reporter. It nearly earned back its production cost in three days.
Compare that with the summer’s cautionary tale. Supergirl opened to $37 million in June, a bigger number on paper, but on a budget of more than $170 million, and it underperformed. A movie does not win by grossing the most. It wins by grossing enough against what it cost.
Audiences are on Clayface’s side too: opening crowds gave it an A-minus CinemaScore, the kind of grade that carries a film through word of mouth in the weeks after opening weekend.
The same weekend delivered a second lesson. The Elizabeth Holmes documentary You Can See Everything, from Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim, grossed $19.5 million in its second weekend after debuting at $15.6 million on fewer than 1,000 screens, the biggest opening for a non-music documentary since Fahrenheit 9/11 made $23.9 million in 2004.
The money, in plain words: the era of spending $170 million and praying is giving way to smaller bets with real upside. A $44 million movie that opens at $24 million is a business. A giant one that opens bigger can still be a loss.
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We Speak Financials
Tom Lee Called 7,700 by Christmas. The Market Got There in October, So He Moved His Target to 8,000
Wall Street’s loudest bull just got his number early. Last December, Fundstrat strategist Tom Lee set a year-end 2026 target of 7,700 for the S&P 500, one of the most bullish calls on the Street at the time. On October 20, the index closed at 7,713, hitting Lee’s year-end number with more than two months to spare. Lee has since raised his target to 8,000.
To be clear on whose view this is: these are Lee’s calls, made publicly by Fundstrat, and we are reporting them the way we report any analyst’s call, with his name on them. They are not our recommendation, and this article is not financial advice.
The interesting part is the gap between the call and the product. Lee’s Granny Shots ETF, ticker GRNY, built around Fundstrat’s themes and holding 42 large-cap U.S. stocks, is up 10.4 percent this year. That trails the S&P 500’s 12.7 percent gain and the Nasdaq-100’s 16.8 percent, in the very year his headline call landed. In 2025 the fund returned 24 percent, ahead of the index’s 17.7 percent.
He is not alone in that gap. In the first half of 2026, 67 percent of U.S. large-cap funds did worse than the S&P 500 itself, according to the S&P Dow Jones Indices scorecard.
The money, in plain words: calling the market right and beating the market are two different skills. Lee nailed the first one this year. The second one is beating almost everybody, including, so far, him.
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