Taika Waititi just pulled a Kevin Smith on Klara and the Sun's critics

On Halloween, Taika Waititi went on Instagram to answer the reviews of Klara and the Sun. Critics, he wrote, are "sad lost souls," and he signed off with a verdict: "Irrelevant. Out of touch. Obsolete. In the bin."

He added that he hasn't read a review of his own work in almost 15 years, and that the same people trashed Jojo Rabbit — the film that holds 81% on Rotten Tomatoes and won him an Oscar.

The outlets covering the rant summarized its core argument as critics being failed artists, people who turned to reviewing after their own work didn't pan out. On r/movies, a commenter pointed out how old that defense is:

"Funny how 'failed artists' have been used to try and dismiss criticism of art for 100+ years. And its always been a sign that you can't even defend your own your work properly."

— a commenter on r/movies

The numbers he's not arguing with

Critics didn't bury Klara and the Sun. Audiences did, by staying home. The film opened on October 23 to $701,059 from 880 theaters — 16th place, about $797 per theater for the whole weekend. At an average ticket price, that's roughly 20 people per location per day.

Waititi says he ignores critics but listens to viewers: "But I do listen to the people." The people who did show up gave the film a 74% audience score; there just weren't many of them. Sony acted on that math fast, gutting the theater count in week two and canceling the international rollout.

Ninety critics reviewed Klara and the Sun. Over opening weekend, the average theater showing it sold about 60 tickets — across three days.

The Kevin Smith playbook

There's a name for this move. When Jersey Girl got panned in 2004, Kevin Smith deflected with the line that the movie wasn't made for critics, and another r/movies commenter remembered exactly that:

"Penny Arcade joked about this all the way back in 2004 when Kevin Smith's film Jersey Girl got panned, and he deflected it by saying that the movie 'wasn't for critics'. It was a childish response then, and it's a childish response now."

— a commenter on r/movies

Smith ran the same play again in 2010, spending the Cop Out rollout arguing that critics shouldn't get to see movies for free.

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The parallel matters because of what came after. Smith kept making films, but the era when studios handed him mainstream budgets ended around the time he started blaming the people reviewing them. Waititi is at a similar fork: Thor: Love and Thunder split audiences in 2022, Next Goal Wins barely registered in 2023, and Klara — an adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro's novel with Jenna Ortega and Amy Adams — posted the softest launch of the three.

For the people who fell in love with What We Do in the Shadows, Hunt for the Wilderpeople, and Jojo Rabbit, this is the painful part. The critics Waititi is telling to get in the bin are largely the same ones who built his reputation, and they're the last group still treating each new Waititi film as an event. Arguing with them won't stop the slide that started with Love and Thunder — it only drives off the people still insisting he's capable of better.

Previously we wrote: I wrote Clayface off as DC's Morbius too. Its international numbers say I was wrong