'The least Waititi movie he's ever released': why Klara and the Sun is flopping

Klara and the Sun opened in US theaters on October 23 to $725,000 from 880 screens — an $824 per-screen average, a finish well outside the top ten, on the same weekend Clayface debuted at No. 1 with $24 million. The budget was a modest $20 million, co-financed with Spyglass, which limits the bleeding. It does nothing for the optics.

The collapse happened fast, and in public:

• Mid-October: the film premieres at the BFI London Film Festival. Variety calls it "calamitous"; IndieWire's Ryan Lattanzio suggests Taika Waititi may be headed for "director jail."
• October 22, the day before release: Sony cuts the planned run from roughly 1,900 theaters to about 850, a move Deadline relays as a "platform release" built on Jenna Ortega's fanbase.
• Opening weekend: $725,000. Rotten Tomatoes settles in the mid-20s, Metacritic at 30.
• The week after: the theatrical release in Spain is scrapped outright, so one of Sony's major European markets will meet the film on a screen at home.

The autopsy doesn't require much cutting. Waititi took Kazuo Ishiguro's novel about an artificial friend — Ortega as Klara, Amy Adams as the mother, Steve Buscemi and Natasha Lyonne in support — and made it reverent, hushed and tasteful, which is to say he removed every quality that built his audience. The man whose Jojo Rabbit put a comic Hitler in a Holocaust story and won a screenwriting Oscar for it approached Ishiguro on his knees, and the result carries his name without a frame of his sensibility. His fans can tell, and the box office is what their verdict looks like in dollars.

The production history says the studio could tell too. The film wrapped photography in New Zealand back in April 2024 and then sat for over a year; Simon Baker was cast as the father and had his entire role cut in the edit). Films that work don't spend eighteen months on the shelf losing parents.

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Where this leaves Waititi

Run the last decade in order: Thor: Ragnarok, $854 million. Jojo Rabbit, an Oscar and $90 million on a $14 million budget. Then Thor: Love and Thunder making $760 million while burning the goodwill, Next Goal Wins at under $19 million worldwide, Time Bandits canceled after one season, a Star Wars movie announced in 2020 that has yet to produce a frame — and now this.

Waititi's 2026 release will reach more people on Netflix than in theaters, through a Sony output deal signed before anyone knew his name would need it.

That's not speculation about his next contract; it's the mechanics of this film's own release. Under Sony's pay-1 arrangement, Klara and the Sun lands on Netflix in early 2027, roughly 120 days after a theatrical run that barely happened. Streaming is where this movie was always going to find its audience — and with the Star Wars project dormant and his television bets dead, streaming is also where the industry now prices the director himself. The version of Waititi that audiences actually loved, the one who smuggled jokes into everything, currently has no project anywhere on the calendar.

Previously we wrote: A horror movie a week before Halloween sounded smart. Clayface's second weekend may prove otherwise