Waititi Goes on the Offensive After Dismal Opening

Taika Waititi is not taking the failure of Klara and the Sun quietly. Following a bruising opening weekend and some of the worst reviews of his career, the director took to Instagram on Halloween to publicly dismiss film critics as "sad lost souls" — and to position audience approval as the only metric that matters.

The post, which featured the film's Rotten Tomatoes scores side by side, made the contrast stark: a 28% critics score against a 78% audience score [1][2]. For a director whose Jojo Rabbit won the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay, the 28% marks a career low on the review aggregator [1].

What the Numbers Actually Say

The box office tells a harder story than any review. Klara and the Sun opened at an estimated $720,000–$725,000 from 880 North American locations in its debut weekend, landing outside the top ten — reportedly as low as No. 15 [1][2]. Sony subsequently scaled back the film's theatrical footprint following the critical drubbing [1]. As of late October, the film had grossed approximately $1.7 million worldwide [2].

Those are sobering figures for an adaptation of a Booker Prize-winning novel, directed by one of Hollywood's most commercially and critically celebrated filmmakers of the past decade.

"Irrelevant. Out of Touch. Obsolete. In the Bin."

Waititi's Instagram caption pulled no punches. "I haven't read a review of anything aimed at me or my peers in almost 15 years. But I do listen to the people," he wrote [1][2]. He then pivoted to a Halloween-themed broadside: "So this Halloween, let's spare a thought for those sad lost souls who couldn't achieve their dreams of becoming artists, and thus became critics. The same people who also hated Jojo Rabbit. Irrelevant. Out of touch. Obsolete. In the bin." [1][2]

The invocation of Jojo Rabbit is notable. That 2019 film also divided critics initially before building significant awards momentum — a trajectory Waititi may be hoping Klara and the Sun can replicate, though the box office gap between the two films makes that comparison difficult to sustain.

Critics, for their part, were not gentle. Reviews described the film as "calamitous" and a "strained, whimsical comedy that's ruinous" [1].

The Film and Its Stars

Klara and the Sun is adapted from Kazuo Ishiguro's 2021 novel of the same name [1][2]. Set in a dystopian near-future, it follows Klara, an obsolete AI companion android, as she attempts to forge a bond with her new owner Josie, a young girl dealing with a serious illness [1][2]. Jenna Ortega plays the titular android, with Amy Adams also starring [2].

Ortega, for her part, has distanced herself from the reception in her own way. In a recent Vogue interview, she said she avoids reading reviews because "that would send me into a psychosis of some sort," and that she doesn't check box office updates when her team sends them because "I don't want it to become a numbers thing" [1].

Waititi on AI — The Film's Central Theme

Separately from the controversy over reviews, Waititi spoke about artificial intelligence at the film's New York premiere earlier this month — a topic directly relevant to Klara and the Sun's premise of AI companions. "There's a big discussion about AI coming in: Will people use it? How much will they use it?" he told The Hollywood Reporter. "I know it's probably inevitable that we end up using it in our industry, but as long as it's used by humans as a tool, as opposed to a replacement — I don't want to replace humans. I want to work with them." [2]

The remarks add a layer of irony to the film's reception: a movie exploring the anxieties of AI obsolescence, made by a director now publicly wrestling with his own sense of creative relevance in the face of institutional criticism.

What to Watch Next

The immediate question is whether Klara and the Sun can find a second life — through streaming, awards-season repositioning, or word-of-mouth driven by that 78% audience score Waititi is so eager to highlight. Sony's decision to pull back on theatrical distribution suggests the studio is not betting heavily on a turnaround at the multiplex [1]. Whether Waititi's public pushback energizes the film's fanbase or simply extends a news cycle defined by bad numbers remains to be seen. The longer arc — how this fits into a directing career that has swung between genuine critical triumph and commercial disappointment — will take longer to assess.