Taika Waititi Calls Critics “Obsolete” as Klara and the Sun Earns Just $1.7M Worldwide

Taika Waititi has told critics they are “irrelevant, out of touch, obsolete” and “in the bin” after Klara and the Sun opened to a rotten Rotten Tomatoes score and a box office launch that barely registered. The film had grossed about $1.7 million worldwide at the time of reporting.

The Oscar-winning director posted the broadside on Instagram on Halloween, sharing the film’s poster along with its Rotten Tomatoes audience and critics scores. “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. He then urged followers to “spare a thought for those sad lost souls who couldn’t achieve their dreams of becoming artists, and thus became critics,” adding that they were “the same people who also hated Jojo Rabbit.”

What the Klara and the Sun scores show

The gap Waititi highlighted is real, though the exact figures shift depending on the outlet and the hour. Reports put the critics’ score between 26 and 28 percent. The audience score was cited at 78 percent in his post, and Deadline noted it had slipped to 73 percent by its report. IGN put it at 74 percent. Either way, viewers have been far kinder than reviewers.

Deadline’s own review said the director seemed a natural fit for Kazuo Ishiguro’s 2021 novel, given his taste for peculiar, cringe-tinged comedy. It concluded that the film “just doesn’t deliver on any of the fronts it promises.” Deadline also reported that the negative notes began with the film’s screening at the BFI London Film Festival this month.

His Jojo Rabbit jab is less clear-cut. IGN pointed out that the 2019 film holds an 81 percent critics’ score on Rotten Tomatoes and drew strong notices, including an 8.5/10 from IGN itself. It is not obvious which negative reaction he means.

A box office launch that barely registered

The commercial picture is harder to spin. Sony reportedly cut the release of Klara and the Sun to roughly 880 North American theaters, down from an anticipated 2,000, according to the sources. The film opened to an estimated $701,000 to $725,000 domestically, depending on the report, and landed outside the top 10. IGN, citing Deadline, said Sony stopped reporting the film’s earnings over the following weekend. Reported budgets range from about $20 million to $40 million.

Some commenters on Deadline’s story blamed thin marketing rather than the reviews, saying they had seen almost no trailers. Others said a film tracking that low would never get a big promotional push. The sources don’t settle that argument, and it’s impossible to say from the numbers alone how much the reviews, the marketing or the material itself drove the result.

The film, and Waititi’s view of AI

The adaptation stars Jenna Ortega as Klara, an “Artificial Friend” bought for a gravely ill teenager, with Amy Adams as the girl’s mother. Waititi’s AI comments at the New York premiere, reported by The Hollywood Reporter, now sit awkwardly beside the public spat. He said AI use in the industry is probably inevitable, but that he wants it used “as a tool, as opposed to a replacement.” He added, “I don’t want to replace humans. I want to work with them.”

Directors pushing back on critics is hardly new, and the audience scores give Waititi some ground to stand on. But with Klara and the Sun struggling to find moviegoers at all, a public attack on reviewers is unlikely to change the box office story. The film is a small-scale test of how far a director’s name and a famous novel can carry a project when both reviews and release plans go wrong.

Explore more on this topic with Vexel Search.

File photo: Taika Waititi photo by pouria afkhami (cropped).jpg by Pixoos, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.