Six of Jenna Ortega's last seven films were panned, and the problem may be Wednesday
A Nobel laureate's novel, Taika Waititi, A24, The Weeknd: on paper, Jenna Ortega's films can't miss. On screen they keep missing, because studios sign up her name before the script is even written.
Klara and the Sun had its world premiere at the BFI London Film Festival on 15 October 2026, and the first reviews landed the same night. Deadline called it "a curiously flat dystopian comedy-drama" and summed it up in one line: "on paper, Klara and the Sun is a great idea... It's just a shame that film didn't get made." Sony puts it in cinemas on 23 October. By Saturday morning a thread on r/Letterboxd with more than 1,600 upvotes and 468 comments was doing the maths: by its count, six of Ortega's last seven films have been critically panned.
Hardly anyone in the thread blames her acting. Even Deadline's review calls her "a fantastic cheerleader for the promised spirit of the film". The thread blames the paper.
Every one of them looked good on paper
The second most upvoted comment puts it plainly: "most of these look really good on paper." Read the pitches back, and it's hard to argue with that:
- Death of a Unicorn (2025): an A24 horror comedy with Paul Rudd, Richard E. Grant and Will Poulter. It opened to under $6 million in the US on a $15 million budget.
- Hurry Up Tomorrow (2025): The Weeknd, directed by Trey Edward Shults of It Comes at Night. It opened to $3.3 million and a C- CinemaScore.
- The Gallerist (2026): an art-world farce with Natalie Portman that premiered at Sundance in January to split reviews, the mildest entry on the list.
- Klara and the Sun (2026): Taika Waititi, Amy Adams and a novel by the Nobel laureate Kazuo Ishiguro.
Add Miller's Girl opposite Martin Freeman and the Tribeca drama Winter Spring Summer or Fall, and you get the six. The seventh, the one that worked, is Beetlejuice Beetlejuice: $452 million worldwide, her biggest film by a mile, directed by Tim Burton, with Ortega as a goth teenager.
So the one hit is the one where the Wednesday director cast her as a girl who would get on rather well with Wednesday.
A name that arrives before the film
The comment that explains the pattern has 396 upvotes, and it doesn't blame Ortega's taste at all. It blames the order in which things happen:
"she currently in that werid A-list tier where studios greenlight her name before a script is even written and it really shows in the final product."
— a user on r/Letterboxd
That's our reading too. Since Wednesday became one of the most-watched series Netflix has ever made, her name has been enough to get a film financed, and a film that's already financed has much less reason to get good. Klara is the clearest case: Amy Adams was in talks to join in February 2024, cameras were due to roll within weeks, and the film then sat for two and a half years before anyone saw it.
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The top comment, at more than 1,700 upvotes, names the price: she's typecast in "weird girl" roles because of Wednesday. A robot learning how people work. A student tangled up with her teacher. A stranger who drags a pop star off the rails.
Every project gets the Wednesday girl. None of them gets a Wednesday script.
To be fair, it's a good look on her, and it's earned. It's also the only look anyone seems to be buying, and an Emmy-nominated lead deserves a longer menu than that.
What comes after Klara
Wednesday wrapped its third season on 30 September, The Gallerist opens on 4 December, and J.J. Abrams' The Great Beyond has slipped to 1 October 2027. Then there's Nasty from Mary Bronstein for Warner Bros., a gymnastics drama about an Olympic hopeful and her coach, with Rose Byrne.
Nasty is the one to watch, for a simple reason: it started life on the 2024 Black List, a script with a reputation before anyone was cast. For once, the script was there before Jenna Ortega was.
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