“Sad lost souls”: Taika Waititi slams critics after Klara and the Sun box office disaster | Movies

Taika Waititi has launched a furious broadside at “critics” following the disastrous commercial performance of Klara and the Sun, his new film adapted from a novel by Kazuo Ishiguro.

In a social media post, Waititi wrote: “This Halloween, let’s spare a thought for those sad lost souls who couldn’t realize their dream of becoming artists, and so settled down and became critics. »

He added: “The same people who also hated Jojo Rabbit… Irrelevant. Out of touch. Obsolete. In the trash.”

Pointing to the disparity between the film’s audience and critics’ ratings on review aggregation site Rotten Tomatoes, which currently stand at 74% for the former and 26% (from 90 reviews) for the latter, Waititi also wrote: “I haven’t read a review of something aimed at me or my peers in almost 15 years. But I listen to people.”

Klara and the Sun, which cost $44 million (£32.8 million) to make, made a dismal $701,000 (£523,000) in its opening weekend at the North American box office, or just under $800 (£596) per theater from 880 theaters. It comes in at #16, well below other similarly-targeted films like Wicker, which opened with $5.7 million in North America from 1,471 theaters, at an average of $3,906 per theater. In contrast, You Can See Everything, the acclaimed documentary about Elizabeth Holmes, raked in $18.7 million in its second weekend and reached a cumulative total of $63.8 million.

In the United Kingdom, the film recorded figures comparable to its North American results, opening weekend at £176,000 from 368 theaters, for an average of £477.

The Guardian’s chief reviewer Peter Bradshaw described Klara and the Sun as having “insufferable manners” and “indescribable behavior” in a one-star review, adding: “(It) is soft-focused science fiction, simultaneously demanding that we laugh at its (unfunny) humor and wipe away a tear at its pass-agg poignancy.” Bradshaw also negatively reviewed Waititi’s 2019 film Jojo Rabbit, calling it “a terrible film…a pointless, Hitler-parody YA adventure with a 12A certificate, stubbornly emphasizing the cuteness and optimism of little children amid strangely imagined non-horror.”

Other reviews were equally negative about Klara and the Sun: in the Observer, Wendy Ide called it “a thin, cloying thing that strips away any depth in the source material and replaces it with self-aware weirdness”, while Tim Grierson of the LA Times said: “(Waititi) lacquers the film with a calculated gooiness that is mind-numbing before becoming downright infuriating.”

Its second weekend at the North American box office saw Klara and the Sun enter a steep decline, falling 79% to $145,000 (£108,000) in a similar number of theaters.