Taika Waititi has answered the negative response to Klara and the Sun with a blunt social-media defense centered on the gap between professional reviews and audience reaction. The filmmaker shared the movie’s poster on Instagram alongside its 78% Rotten Tomatoes audience score, while dismissing critics as disconnected from the people he believes matter most: viewers.
The contrast is stark. Klara and the Sun holds a 28% critics’ score alongside that 78% audience figure. The supplied figures make this Waititi’s lowest critic score to date, and they arrive amid an underwhelming start in theaters: $720,000 from 880 locations, enough for a No. 15 opening. Sony subsequently reduced the film’s theatrical footprint.
Waititi’s post did not make a case for a specific scene, performance, or adaptation choice. Instead, it questioned the relevance of critics as a group. He said he had not read reviews directed at him or his peers for nearly 15 years, but added that he listens to “the people.” He also invoked the hostile response some critics gave Jojo Rabbit, framing the present disagreement as part of a familiar divide between reviewers and the eventual audience for his work.
What the score split says—and what it does not
A critic score and an audience score measure different pools of opinion, so they should not be treated as competing scientific verdicts. The 28% figure summarizes a set of published critical reviews. The 78% number reflects ratings from audience members using Rotten Tomatoes. Those groups can overlap in taste, but they are not evaluating a film from the same position or under the same conditions.
Critics generally assess a movie as part of a wider body of work, weighing elements such as storytelling, tone, performances, direction, and the success of an adaptation. Audience members may use those same standards, but their reaction can be more directly rooted in whether the film moved, entertained, surprised, or connected with them. Neither perspective automatically cancels the other out.
In this case, the distance between the two figures is substantial enough to become part of the conversation around the film. It suggests that at least some viewers who chose to rate it found more value in it than the overall critical consensus did. It does not, by itself, establish how many people saw the movie, why they saw it, or whether the audience response will translate into greater theatrical momentum.
That distinction matters because online scores are often flattened into a simple win-or-loss scoreboard. A higher audience score can be meaningful evidence of viewer appreciation. It is not a replacement for box-office reporting, just as a poor opening weekend cannot fully explain an individual viewer’s response. These are separate signals: critical reception, audience sentiment, and ticket sales each describe a different part of a film’s public life.
A tough opening for a high-profile adaptation
The commercial picture is more difficult. Klara and the Sun opened in 880 locations and brought in $720,000, placing 15th. The distributor then scaled back the number of theaters showing it. While the information available does not establish a single cause for that result, the timing places the smaller theatrical footprint after the movie’s widely negative review cycle and quiet debut.
A theatrical footprint simply means the number of locations where a film is playing. Fewer locations reduce the number of opportunities for moviegoers to buy tickets, which can make a comeback at the box office more challenging. That is a practical distribution decision, not necessarily an artistic judgment. Still, it is one of the clearest immediate consequences when a film has a subdued opening.
Waititi’s decision to highlight the audience score therefore reads less like a response to the revenue number than a challenge to the idea that poor reviews should define the movie’s identity. His central claim is that the people who have seen the movie deserve greater weight than those reviewing it professionally. It is an understandable response from a director defending a project, though it also turns a conversation about one film into a larger argument over who gets to shape cultural judgment.
That argument is hardly unique to cinema. Games, television, albums, comics, and live events all routinely generate competing narratives from critics, fans, sales charts, and social media. Joking Joystick recently considered a related question in music: whether public impact is best measured through output, recall, or fan connection. That debate over output, recall and fan connection is not identical to this movie’s reception, but it reflects the same basic problem: popularity, critical admiration, and cultural staying power are related measures, not interchangeable ones.
The story at the center of the film
Klara and the Sun is adapted from Kazuo Ishiguro’s 2021 novel. Its premise is set in a dystopian future and follows Klara, an obsolete companion android played by Jenna Ortega. Klara attempts to connect with her new owner, Josie, a young girl who is ill.
The term android refers to a humanlike artificial being. In this story, the detail that Klara is obsolete immediately gives the character a position of vulnerability: she is not merely different from the humans around her, but a companion built for a role that may already be passing her by. The supplied premise also links that technological displacement to a personal relationship with Josie. At its most basic level, the setup asks viewers to consider connection between a machine designed to serve and a sick child who needs companionship.
Dystopian does not necessarily mean a story has no hope. It describes a fictional society shaped by troubling conditions or systems. Here, that setting places an artificial companion and a vulnerable child inside a future where obsolescence is an explicit fact of life. That is fertile material for questions of care, usefulness, personhood, and attachment, though the available details do not support claims about precisely how the film resolves or develops those ideas.
The title character’s point of view is also significant. A companion android is likely to be understood by the people around her in terms of function—what she can do, whom she can help, whether she can be replaced. A story focused on Klara has the potential to shift attention toward what it means to be valued only for utility. That is an interpretation of the premise, rather than a statement of the film’s final message, but it helps explain why the central concept can invite strong reactions even when critics disagree about the execution.
Jenna Ortega’s boundary around reviews and numbers
Ortega has expressed a more personal version of the same resistance to the constant appraisal that surrounds a release. In an interview, she said she does not read reviews of her films, explaining that doing so could send her “into a psychosis of some sort.” She also said she avoids box-office updates that reach her through her team because she does not want the work to become “a numbers thing.”
Her comments and Waititi’s post arrive at the issue from different angles. Ortega describes protecting her own mental space from relentless assessment. Waititi directly attacks the authority of critics while elevating audience reaction. Both positions recognize the pressure created when a film becomes a set of live metrics: ratings, rankings, grosses, headlines, and arguments that can eclipse the work itself.
For actors and directors, those metrics can be particularly unforgiving because they are updated publicly and often reduced to a single number. A 28% or a 78% is easy to repeat, but it cannot convey the different reasons behind every review or rating. It cannot show whether a viewer admired Ortega’s performance but disliked the film’s tone, or whether a critic responded to the premise but felt the adaptation fell short. Numbers are useful shorthand; they are thin description.
Why Waititi’s post is likely to keep the attention on the divide
Waititi’s criticism of critics is unlikely to settle the question of whether Klara and the Sun succeeds. If anything, it gives the reception a new front: viewers can now debate the director’s reaction alongside the movie. That can be useful for a film struggling to cut through the noise, because it keeps its title in circulation. It can also harden sides, encouraging people to choose between “critics” and “audiences” rather than talk about the material itself.
There is a more constructive reading of the audience-score emphasis. It is a reminder that people can be curious about a film even after poor reviews, and that critics do not hold exclusive ownership over taste. Anyone interested in the premise can make up their own mind. At the same time, dismissing all criticism as irrelevant skips over the role criticism can play for viewers who want an informed perspective before spending time or money on a movie.
The available numbers leave Klara and the Sun in an awkward but recognizable position: it has received a harsh critical consensus, warmer audience ratings from those who have weighed in, and a weak initial theatrical result. Waititi is clearly choosing which of those signals to amplify. Whether that audience support expands beyond the current score is unknown. What is clear is that the film’s reception has become a case study in the imperfect, sometimes combative relationship between reviews, public response, and commercial performance.
