Taika Waititi calls critics 'sad lost souls' as 'Klara and the Sun' tanks at box office

Taika Waititi spent Halloween on Instagram not promoting his new film so much as going to war over it. With 'Klara and the Sun' — his adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro's novel — sitting at a 26% critics' score on Rotten Tomatoes and a $701,000 opening weekend in North America, the director turned his social media account into a counter-attack, calling critics 'sad lost souls' and dismissing their notices as the work of people who are 'irrelevant, out of touch, obsolete.'

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.— Taika Waititi, director

The same people who also hated Jojo Rabbit … Irrelevant. Out of touch. Obsolete. In the bin.— Taika Waititi, director

The post also highlighted the film's audience score — reported by Waititi as 78%, against a critics' score he cited at 28% — as evidence that the professional reviewing class had lost touch with ordinary filmgoers. He noted that he had gone nearly 15 years without reading a review directed at him or his peers, adding: 'But I do listen to the people.'

The numbers Waititi is pushing back against are stark. The film, which reportedly cost $44 million to make, earned $701,000 across 880 North American venues in its opening weekend — an average of just under $800 per theatre — and finished 16th at the box office. Its second weekend was worse: a 79% drop to $145,000 from a similar number of venues. In the UK, the opening weekend brought in £176,000 from 368 venues, averaging £477 per cinema, according to The Guardian.

For context, The Guardian noted that Wicker — a similarly positioned film — opened the same weekend with $5.7 million from 1,471 North American venues at an average of $3,906 per cinema. The documentary about Elizabeth Holmes, You Can See Everything, scored $18.7 million in its second weekend alone and has reached a cumulative $63.8 million.

The critical reception has been pointed. The Guardian's chief critic Peter Bradshaw awarded the film one star, characterizing it as "unbearably mannered" and "unspeakably acted" and dismissing it as "soft-centred sci-fi-lite, simultaneously demanding we laugh at its (unfunny) humour and wipe away a tear at its pass-agg poignancy." Writing in the Observer, Wendy Ide described the picture as "a thin and cloying thing that strips away any profundity in the source material and replaces it with self-conscious quirkiness." The LA Times' Tim Grierson argued that Waititi "lacquers the film with a calculated gooeyness that's stultifying before it becomes downright exasperating."

Waititi's invocation of Jojo Rabbit is pointed: that 2019 film, which won him an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay, was also poorly received by some critics — including Bradshaw, who called it 'a terrible film … a pointless Hitler-spoofy YA adventure.' It went on to earn over $90 million worldwide and win the Oscar. The implication in his post is clear: critics were wrong then, and they are wrong now.

Whether the audience score can translate into the kind of word-of-mouth recovery Jojo Rabbit achieved is the question hanging over the film's remaining theatrical run. A 79% second-weekend drop suggests the audience turning up is not, so far, sending others.

Why it matters — The standoff between a major filmmaker and professional critics over a costly box office disappointment raises live questions about whether audience scores on aggregator sites are becoming the new currency of legitimacy in Hollywood — and whether they can rescue a film already in steep decline.

Sources differ on Rotten Tomatoes critics' score at time of reporting: 26% from 90 reviews (theguardian.com) vs 28% (variety.com)

Sources differ on Rotten Tomatoes audience score cited: 74% (theguardian.com) vs 78% (as cited by Waititi in his post) (variety.com)

Reported by variety.com, theguardian.com, hollywoodreporter.com