Jenna Ortega’s Klara and the Sun is crashing so hard that Sony stopped reporting its box office

Back in the day, prestige literary adaptations were almost a guaranteed fixture of awards season – the sort you’d see turn up in late October, hang around cinemas for months, and collect a stack of Oscar buzz as they went. Lately, though, these mid-budget dramas have been struggling. If the critics aren’t keen, the box office can get grim in a hurry. The latest to hit the wall? Taika Waititi’s Klara and the Sun, starring Jenna Ortega, which is now entering its third weekend looking frankly embarrassed. The US take? About $1.2 million so far. Sony, for their part, seem to have decided reporting the figures is more trouble than it’s worth.

Klara and the Sun has taken in just $1.2 million domestically as it limps into its third weekend.

A Vanishing Act at the Box Office

Run the maths on this one and it gets bleak fast. With an average ticket price, reports suggest some cinemas showing Klara are pulling in a grand total of about $17 per day. That’s one or two actual paying customers per location, per day, spread across the 880 US screens still technically listing the film – barely a release, more like a contractual obligation. Sony started ducking questions about the film’s gross back in weekend two. From then on, figures filtered through from third-party trackers, with Box Office Mojo logging the second weekend somewhere between $45,000 and $165,000 depending on whose count you trust. Either way, it’s one of the sharpest crashes on record for any narrative film given this sort of scale. The daily averages have dropped so low they barely hit double digits.

Flop Was on the Cards

This wasn’t an easy stumble to miss, either. Sony’s original plan was a bit ambitious: drop Klara and the Sun into over 1,900 cinemas at first, chasing that awards-style release. But a day before launch, after the early reviews appeared – sitting at 26% on Rotten Tomatoes and branded by the site as ‘cloying and twee’ – they panicked, chopping the footprint back to those 880 theatres. The fall-back play? Lean on Ortega’s substantial Disney-originated fandom and hope they’d show up even if the critics bailed out. As one insider summed it up to Deadline, 'The Jenna Ortega fans were not seeing this as their movie.'

• Jenna Ortega leads as Klara; supporting cast includes Amy Adams, Steve Buscemi, and Natasha Lyonne
• Directed by Taika Waititi
• Script adapted from Kazuo Ishiguro’s acclaimed novel
• US release whittled down from an initial 1,900+ cinemas to just 880 at the last second
• Simon Baker filmed a role, later cut entirely during an extended post-production

In the end, packing a highbrow robot tale full of recognisable faces is no guarantee for ticket sales, especially if the marketing leans on stills of Jenna Ortega looking thoughtful rather than anything her Wednesday fans might actually want to watch. Waititi himself hasn’t exactly kept shtum during all this.

After the reviews bombed, he popped up on Instagram with a few choice words for the critics:

‘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... Irrelevant. Out of touch. Obsolete. In the bin.’

He also pointed out the gap between the critic reviews and the film’s audience score (mid-70s), though if you consider barely anyone has seen it, that data’s not exactly robust. Meanwhile, Sony quietly pulled the plug on the planned Spanish launch, more or less giving up on a proper international release. Internally, it sounds like the rot set in earlier: the movie actually wrapped filming back in 2024, but was left in limbo for a full two years while Sony dithered and re-edited. By the time it limped to screens, the wheels had long since fallen off. Don’t be surprised if its next stop is under Sony’s streaming deal with Netflix, where, frankly, it probably belongs.