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News / Published 2026-11-01

Taika Waititi Calls Klara and the Sun Critics Irrelevant and Obsolete

The director used a Halloween Instagram caption to set a 78 percent audience score against the critics who panned his Ishiguro film, calling them sad lost souls. It opened in 880 theatres.

Q.QIBA Screen deskSource-backed article · 5 min read
Event date Prepared Published 2026-11-01
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THE SHORT VERSION

  • Taika Waititi posted the Klara and the Sun poster on Instagram on Saturday and pointed at the gap between its 78 percent audience score and its critics score, The Hollywood Reporter reports.
  • Both papers quote his caption calling reviewers sad lost souls who became critics because they could not become artists, and closing with irrelevant, out of touch, obsolete, in the bin.
  • The two reports differ on the critics score, 26 percent in Deadline and 28 percent in The Hollywood Reporter, and on the opening weekend, $701,000 against an estimated $725,000.

A poster, two scores and a Saturday post

Taika Waititi spent part of Saturday on Instagram arguing with his reviews. The Hollywood Reporter reports that the director shared the poster for Klara and the Sun and pointed at the gap between its audience and critics scores on Rotten Tomatoes: 78 percent against 28 percent. Deadline puts the critics figure at 26 percent and dates the post to Saturday too; it also places the opening at last weekend.

Deadline frames the post less diplomatically, as choice words for critics, and notes that the director is an Oscar winner. It also says he used the post to boast about the audience number. Both papers agree on the mechanics: a poster, two scores side by side, and a caption written for the people who had already bought tickets. Deadline’s own headline uses two of the director’s words.

The caption, in full

The caption is the part both papers quote at length. “I haven’t read a review of anything aimed at me or my peers in almost 15 years,” Waititi wrote, according to The Hollywood Reporter. “But I do listen to the people.” Deadline prints the same two sentences and describes them as his preface to what followed.

What followed was the part that travelled. “So this Halloween, let’s spare a thought for those sad lost souls who couldn’t achieve their dreams of becoming artists, and thus became critics. The same people who also hated Jojo Rabbit,” he wrote, before closing with four verdicts: “Irrelevant. Out of touch. Obsolete. In the bin.” The two papers divide the passage differently: Deadline breaks it at the Jojo Rabbit reference and resumes with a fresh attribution, while The Hollywood Reporter runs the whole thing as one caption.

Where the two accounts disagree

The audience figure in the post was the one on the poster. The Hollywood Reporter says the image showed a 78 percent audience score next to a 28 percent critics score. Deadline reports the same 78 percent and adds that it has since slipped, putting it at 73 percent at the time of writing, against a critics rating it gives as 26 percent. Neither paper says which view of the Rotten Tomatoes page the poster reproduced. Deadline’s figure comes with a timestamp; The Hollywood Reporter’s does not.

That two-point gap is one of two small disagreements in the coverage, and neither paper explains it. Neither says when the scores were captured, how many reviews each figure rests on, or whether the post was still up when the stories were filed. Rotten Tomatoes is named by both; neither links to the page it is quoting. Two points do not change what the caption was complaining about, but they do change the record of it, and neither paper builds anything more on it.

A weak opening, counted two ways

The Hollywood Reporter has the fuller commercial picture. It reports that the film opened in 880 North American theatres, earned an estimated $725,000 in its opening weekend, finished outside the top 10, and had taken about $1.7 million worldwide as of publication. The paper labels the weekend figure an estimate rather than a studio number, and it does not give a budget.

Deadline gives a different opening figure, $701,000 domestic, and adds two things the other report leaves out: a reported budget of $20 million and a distribution decision. It reports that Sony cut the film’s wide release to 880 theatres in the US after the negative reviews out of BFI this month. The Hollywood Reporter mentions the 880 theatres without tying that number to the reviews, and neither paper says how many theatres the film played before any cut.

The review Deadline was reporting on

Deadline’s own notice is part of the record it is reporting on. Damon White wrote that Waititi should be a snug fit for Ishiguro’s novel given the director’s taste for a particular kind of cringe comedy, then concluded that “Klara just doesn’t deliver on any of the fronts it promises.” The paper prints that verdict above its box-office paragraph; the notice is one of the reviews the post was answering. It is the only review either story quotes.

Neither paper quotes a critic responding to the post, and neither reports a reply from Sony Pictures. What the coverage records is a sequence: reviews out of BFI, a wide release cut to 880 theatres, an opening outside the top 10, and a director answering on Instagram on a Saturday afternoon. No one in either story speaks for the critics as a group.

The film behind the argument

Klara and the Sun adapts Kazuo Ishiguro’s 2021 novel. The Hollywood Reporter describes it as a dystopian story about an obsolete companion android who tries to bond with her new owner, Josie, a girl dealing with an illness, with Jenna Ortega and Amy Adams starring. Deadline describes the same android as an artificial friend bought for a gravely ill teenager, gives Josie’s performer as Mia Tharia, and says the family is mourning the death of her older sister Sal. The sister’s name comes from Deadline; the other report does not give it.

At the New York premiere earlier this month the director was already talking about artificial intelligence, which the film’s premise turns on. The Hollywood Reporter quotes him saying that AI is probably inevitable in the industry but should be used by humans as a tool, as opposed to a replacement. Neither paper says whether Sony or any critic has answered the post. Related coverage on this site includes the BFI London Film Festival 2026 winners, the Asia Pacific Screen Awards and the first reviews of The Mosquito Bowl.

Sources & reporting limits

  1. Taika Waititi Calls ‘Klara And The Sun’ Critics “Irrelevant, Out Of Touch, Obsolete” — Deadline
  2. ‘Klara and the Sun’ Director Taika Waititi Calls Critics “Sad Lost Souls” Over Negative Reviews — The Hollywood Reporter
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