‘Sad lost souls’: Taika Waititi lambasts critics after Klara and the Sun box-office disaster

Taika Waititi has launched a furious broadside at “critics” following the disastrous commercial performance of Klara and the Sun, his new film adapted from a Kazuo Ishiguro novel.

In a post on social media, Waititi wrote: “This Halloween, let’s spare a thought for those sad lost souls who couldn’t achieve their dreams of becoming artists, and thus settled, and became critics.”

He added: “The same people who also hated Jojo Rabbit … Irrelevant. Out of touch. Obsolete. In the bin.”

Pointing to the disparity of the film’s audience and critics’ score on review aggregator site Rotten Tomatoes, which currently stands at 74% for the former and 26% (from 90 reviews) for the latter, Waititi also wrote: “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.”

Klara and the Sun, which cost a reported $44m (£32.8m) to make, achieved a dismal $701,000 (£523,000) on its first weekend at the North American box office, working out at just under $800 (£596) per theatre from 880 venues. It came in at 16th place, well below other similarly aimed films such as Wicker, which opened with $5.7m in North America from 1471 venues at an average of $3,906 per cinema. In contrast, You Can See Everything, the celebrated documentary about Elizabeth Holmes scored $18.7m on its second weekend and has reached a cumulative total of $63.8m.

In the UK, the film recorded comparable figures to its North American results, with an opening weekend of £176,000 from 368 venues, for an average of £477.

The Guardian’s chief critic Peter Bradshaw described Klara and the Sun as “unbearably mannered” and “unspeakably acted” in a one-star review, adding: “[It] is soft-centred sci-fi-lite, simultaneously demanding we laugh at its (unfunny) humour and wipe away a tear at its pass-agg poignancy.” Bradshaw also negatively reviewed Waititi’s 2019 film Jojo Rabbit, calling it a “terrible film … a pointless Hitler-spoofy YA adventure with a 12A certificate, obtusely accentuating little-kid cuteness and optimism amid the quaintly imagined non-horror.”

Other reviewers have been equally negative towards Klara and the Sun: in the Observer, Wendy Ide called it “a thin and cloying thing that strips away any profundity in the source material and replaces it with self-conscious quirkiness”, while the LA Times’ Tim Grierson said: “[Waititi] lacquers the film with a calculated gooeyness that’s stultifying before it becomes downright exasperating”.

Its second weekend at the North American box-office saw Klara and the Sun enter a steep decline, dropping 79% to $145,000 (£108,000) from a similar number of venues.