The box office, for now, is the only verdict with numbers attached.
Taika Waititi has attacked film critics after the poor commercial opening of Klara and the Sun, his adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro's novel. In a social media post reported by The Guardian, the director wrote: "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." He added that the same people had hated Jojo Rabbit, calling them "Irrelevant. Out of touch. Obsolete. In the bin."
The numbers behind the dispute are stark. According to the report, the film cost a reported $44m to make and took $701,000 on its first weekend in North America, from 880 venues, an average of just under $800 per theatre. It placed 16th. Comparable releases did better: Wicker opened with $5.7m from 1,471 venues, while the documentary You Can See Everything reached $63.8m cumulatively by its second weekend. In the UK, the film took £176,000 from 368 venues, an average of £477. Its second North American weekend fell 79% to $145,000.
Waititi pointed to Rotten Tomatoes, where the film stands at 74% with audiences and 26% with critics across 90 reviews. "I haven't read a review of anything aimed at me or my peers in almost 15 years," he wrote. "But I do listen to the people." The gap is real, and it is the kind of split that studios watch closely, since it suggests either a marketing failure or a genuine divergence between professional and popular taste.
The critical reception was severe. The Guardian's chief critic Peter Bradshaw gave the film one star, calling it "unbearably mannered" and "unspeakably acted", and describing it as "soft-centred sci-fi-lite". The Observer's Wendy Ide said it "strips away any profundity in the source material and replaces it with self-conscious quirkiness". The LA Times' Tim Grierson wrote of a "calculated gooeyness that's stultifying before it becomes downright exasperating". Bradshaw had also condemned Jojo Rabbit, which Waititi invokes as evidence of a long-running critical hostility.
What the episode does not establish is why audiences stayed away. The report gives no exit-polling, no marketing spend and no international totals beyond the UK, so the claim that reviews drove the collapse rests on correlation rather than evidence. A 26% critics' score can deter casual viewers, but a $44m film opening at under $800 per theatre points to problems of awareness and positioning that no review page explains on its own. Nor is it confirmed whether the film will recoup through streaming or overseas release.
The wider significance lies in the argument Waititi is making. Directors have long resented critics, but framing audience scores as the authentic verdict and professional judgment as obsolete is a sharper move, and it lands in an industry already uncertain about the value of review coverage. Whether that argument persuades anyone beyond his existing admirers is not yet known. The box office, for now, is the only verdict with numbers attached.
