Taika Waititi has named his culprit for Klara and the Sun, and it is the critics. In an Instagram post over Halloween weekend, the Jojo Rabbit director called the reviewers who panned his Kazuo Ishiguro adaptation “irrelevant”, “out of touch” and “obsolete”, the “sad lost souls” who failed as artists and became critics instead. He does not read reviews, he wrote. “But I do listen to the people.”

It is a tidy story, and parts of the trade press have told a version of it. Deadline’s post-mortem on the release closes on “the pack nature of critics” thwarting the best of commercial intentions. The problem is the record. The people Waititi says he listens to were missing before a single review ran, and the film he is defending had already been reshaped to please them.

The audience was missing before the reviews

Deadline reports that Sony dated the film for a wide release back in mid-April, and that tracking six weeks out sat “in the low single digits”. That was before the world premiere at the BFI London Film Festival, before The Guardian called it “a sentimental mess”, and before the Rotten Tomatoes critics’ score settled at around a quarter positive. The reviews accelerated a collapse. They did not start it.

Sony’s response was to retreat. The studio had planned a wide launch on roughly 2,000 screens, by ScreenRant’s count, and Variety reports it cut the film to a moderate release after London. Variety’s pre-weekend projection was already a modest $2 million. The film opened in North America to $701,059 from 880 theaters, an average below $800 a screen, according to The Numbers, and Variety ranked it No. 15 for the weekend. Slate’s Laura Miller called it “shaping up to be a legendary bomb”.

The people already got their ending

The sharper problem for Waititi’s defense is the ending. According to Deadline, a source close to the testing described the original ending as “a bummer” and more faithful to Ishiguro’s novel. Waititi worked with 3000 Pictures producer Elizabeth Gabler on reshoots with Jenna Ortega in April 2025 that moved it to a “significantly more positive place”. Deadline heard that test scores rose from 83% positive to 87% with the new ending, while other sources said audiences never bought the tone.

So the film was already tuned to the people before the critics saw it. The critics then punished that tuning. The Rotten Tomatoes consensus faults it for flattening the novel’s ideas and calls it “cloying and twee”. Miller wondered in Slate whether someone involved feared that staying closer to the book would make the movie uncommercial. Deadline’s reporting suggests someone acted on that fear, and the commercial version still found no crowd.

What the people actually said

The audience that did turn up gave its own lukewarm verdict. PostTrak exit polling, cited by Deadline, came in at 69% positive and 48% definite recommend, a weak result, with viewers under 25 making up just 19% of the crowd. “The Jenna Ortega fans were not seeing this as their movie,” one source told the trade. The 78% Rotten Tomatoes audience score Waititi posted is real. It is also the score of the few who bought a ticket.

His line that critics “also hated Jojo Rabbit” does not survive the record either. That film was certified fresh at 81%, won the People’s Choice Award at TIFF, earned Waititi the Oscar for Adapted Screenplay and grossed $93 million worldwide, per Deadline.

The money, and who pays for it

Through its second Friday the film had about $1.07 million domestic and roughly $1.7 million worldwide, according to The Numbers. It opened 13th in Australia with $257,000, Variety Australia reported, and Sony reportedly scrapped the theatrical release in Spain to limit losses, according to Hobby Consolas as cited by ScreenRant.

Sony can absorb it. Studio insiders told Deadline the film cost a net high $20 million before marketing, although pre-finance documents the outlet saw listed a direct cost of $44.3 million before about $7.55 million in expected New Zealand subsidies. Spyglass and TSG covered half the budget, Sony’s marketing spend fell well short of $30 million worldwide once the release shrank, and Netflix is the first US streaming home for Sony’s theatrical films. Next to the $150 million-plus loss Deadline reports on Tom Cruise‘s Digger, this is a contained write-down.

Ishiguro has never been an easy sell at the multiplex. Marketing sources told Deadline the novel is not widely read, so there was no built-in audience, and Never Let Me Go, the film of his earlier dystopian novel, took $2.4 million domestic. That history argued for a stranger, more faithful film. Sony and Waititi chose the warmer one.

The bill lands on the director’s name, not the studio’s balance sheet. Waititi cut toward the test audience, then told the critics he only answers to the people. The people got the happier ending, and they still stayed home.