“Irrelevant. Obsolete. In the bin”: Taika Waititi hits back at critics after Klara and the Sun flops

Let’s get into the latest chapter of Taika Waititi versus, well, everyone who didn’t much care for his new film. If you thought people argued over Marmite, try scrolling the reactions to Klara and the Sun. Turns out, there’s now a gaping canyon between the journos bashing it and the fans supporting it—Waititi himself is leaning hard into the divide, and he’s got no time for the traditional critics these days.

Klara and the Sun has just a 28% score from critics on Rotten Tomatoes, but boasts a 78% audience rating.

Waititi Fires Back

All right, the film world runs on controversy and the odd clash of egos, but Waititi’s response to the pile-on is pretty direct: he’s gone and posted a poster of his film’s much stronger audience score, along with what you’d honestly have to call a fairly pointed Instagram caption. He reckons he hasn’t even glanced at critic reviews aimed at him or his contemporaries for over a decade. But the part everyone’s actually quoting is the shot he takes at critics themselves. Here’s what Waititi wrote, right below his audience score poster:

‘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.’

Now, whether you think he’s got a point or you’re rolling your eyes, it’s classic Waititi—no filter, plenty of irreverence, and not a whiff of self-doubt in sight.

A Film About Artificial Friends

The actual plot of Klara and the Sun has stayed oddly mysterious in much of the marketing, though the novel by Kazuo Ishiguro gives you the gist. The lead’s called Klara, an Artificial Friend who sits in a shop window watching human behaviour, holding out hope that someone will one day buy her and take her home. When it looks like her future is about to get a shake-up, she’s warned against putting too much faith in humanity’s promises. So yes, it’s fairly melancholy robot fare, but allegedly clever about it.

• Klara is an AI ‘Friend’ in a shop window, studying humans from a distance
• Longs to be chosen by a family, but is cautioned not to trust their intentions fully
• Story adapted from Ishiguro’s prize-winning novel

Box Office and the Mental Health Game

Not to sugarcoat it: the film’s launch was rough. Klara and the Sun opened in the US with a tiny $720,000 haul from 880 cinemas—not remotely what you’d call a blockbuster, and the response meant Sony swiftly pulled back on its theatrical run. For Waititi’s part, he seems unbothered by the numbers, but he’s not alone in this approach. The star, Jenna Ortega, has said she avoids reviews entirely to look after her sanity: reading them, as she told Vogue, would ‘send me into a psychosis of some sort.’ She doesn’t track the box office either—her words, she doesn’t want it to ‘become a numbers thing.’