Waititi Blasts Critics After Klara and the Sun Flops
After a weak opening for his Ishiguro adaptation, the director wrote that critics are out of touch and that he listens to audiences instead.
Klara and the Sun has opened to very little money, and its director is blaming the reviewers. Taika Waititi, who adapted Kazuo Ishiguro's novel, answered the bad notices with a post that dismisses critics as a group.
Two scores that point in opposite directions
On Rotten Tomatoes the film stands at 74% with audiences and 26% with critics, the latter from 90 reviews. Waititi built his argument on that gap.
The critics' side is not hard to find. Peter Bradshaw, chief critic of the Guardian, gave one star and called the film "unbearably mannered". Wendy Ide of the Observer wrote that it strips the novel of its profundity and puts self-conscious quirkiness in its place. Tim Grierson of the LA Times found the film's calculated sweetness numbing at first and then exasperating.
Bradshaw had also panned Waititi's 2019 film Jojo Rabbit, calling it a terrible film.
The director's answer
Waititi wrote that the same people hated Jojo Rabbit, and called them "Irrelevant. Out of touch. Obsolete. In the bin."
He added that he has not read a review of anything aimed at him or his peers in almost 15 years, and that he listens to the people instead. The post began with a Halloween jibe at those who gave up on becoming artists and turned critic.
Box office figures
The film reportedly cost $44m. Its first weekend in North America brought $701,000 from 880 venues, just under $800 a theatre, and a 16th-place finish. The second weekend was worse: a 79% drop to $145,000 from a similar number of venues.
The Guardian sets this against Wicker, a film aimed at a similar audience, which opened to $5.7m from 1,471 venues, or $3,906 per cinema. It also points to the documentary You Can See Everything, about Elizabeth Holmes. That film took $18.7m on its second weekend and $63.8m in total.
In the UK the opening weekend was £176,000 from 368 venues, an average of £477. The Guardian calls that comparable to the North American results.
Our View
Waititi's argument rests on the audience score, and the box-office figures give it little help: if viewers liked the film, few of them bought a ticket. Whether the film finds viewers on streaming or home video is the open question, since the reports do not cover it.
Source: The Guardian