Klara and the Sun, Taika Waititi’s science fiction adaptation starring Jenna Ortega and Amy Adams, opened to $701,059 domestic on October 23 across 880 screens. Sony cut its planned release of about 1,900 screens to that number after the film struggled to generate interest. The film averaged roughly $797 per theater and carries a reported $20 million budget. The same weekend, Clayface took first place with a $24 million domestic debut.
Reviews gave the film little help. Klara and the Sun holds 25 percent on Rotten Tomatoes from 88 reviews, and the critics’ consensus says it “aims to be endearing and inspiring but winds up cloying and twee.” The audience score stands at 74 percent from more than 100 verified ratings. Slate’s headline calls it “shaping up to be a legendary bomb,” and its review describes the novel’s existential themes as “swamped by Waititi’s relentless whimsy.”
The source material is Kazuo Ishiguro’s 2021 novel, his first since winning the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2017. Faber and Faber and Alfred A. Knopf published it on March 2, 2021. It debuted at No. 6 on The New York Times fiction best-seller list, was longlisted for the 2021 Booker Prize, and was longlisted for the 2022 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction. The Washington Post put it on its 10 best books of 2021. Kirkus gave it a starred review and called it a “haunting fable of a lonely, moribund world that is entirely too plausible.”
Klara is a solar-powered “Artificial Friend” bought as a companion for Josie, a sick 14-year-old in a near future where parents genetically “lift” their children to get them ahead. Klara regards the Sun as a living, almost divine presence. She believes he can heal Josie, and she pleads with him on Josie’s behalf. Ishiguro told NPR in 2022 that Klara is “like a tabula rasa at the beginning, and she’s quite childlike and very open.” On her belief in the Sun, he said, “I just thought Klara would reflect that aspect of humanity, like she reflects other aspects of humanity.” He added, “I don’t think I was trying to be critical of religion.” Anne Enright wrote in The Guardian that “Klara and the Sun is a book about what it is to be human.”
The book arrived with a Japanese reading attached. Ishiguro grew up in Guildford, England, where his family was one of the few Japanese families in town. In a chapter published by Springer, scholar Ria Taketomi argues that Osamu Tezuka’s Astro Boy, the postwar manga about a robot boy named Atom, influenced Ishiguro’s novels, Klara and the Sun above all. She points to three links: shared descriptive echoes, human characters who live with a robot after losing a child, and innocent robots who sacrifice themselves for their human friends, with the sun as a recurring motif. The chapter’s reference list cites a 2017 Japan Forward interview with Ishiguro titled “Manga, AI, and Other Sources of Inspiration.” The page I could read did not quote what he said there.
The release history is long. Sony’s 3000 Pictures acquired the rights in July 2020, and Waititi and Dahvi Waller wrote the screenplay. Principal photography began in January 2024 under the working title Tears and Rain, and filming wrapped that April. Sony then held the film for roughly two and a half years. In January 2026, Waititi told Screen Daily he was still talking with Sony about “when and where” it would be released, and said, “We’re thinking about festivals and stuff like that.” The October 23 date and the first trailer arrived in April 2026. Den of Geek described the trailer’s tone as “odd,” and its writeup of the footage did not explain what happens in the story.
The damage has spread beyond the American box office. Sony cancelled the planned Spanish theatrical release, according to Hobby Consolas, and Collider reports the international theatrical release has been cancelled as well. Worldwide gross stood near $1.6 million at last count. The cast includes Ortega, Adams, Steve Buscemi and Natasha Lyonne, and Michael Giacchino composed the score.
A studio that holds a finished picture for two and a half years, announces a date six months out, and then cuts its screen count by more than half has told the audience how much it expects. The source is an award-nominated novel with a global readership and a cast that includes two stars with audiences of their own. If Sony could not explain this film to moviegoers, who was it for?
If the golden age of Trek and Babylon 5 left a hole in your sci-fi diet, The Stars Entwined fills it — interstellar espionage between two civilizations on the brink of war. Read The Stars Entwined on Amazon!
Obviously, Taika Waititi wasn’t the right director for the job. Sony should have found someone else.