Taika Waititi Calls Out His ‘Klara and the Sun’ Critics: ‘Irrelevant, Out of Touch, Obsolete’

Skip to content “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 filmmaker says October 31, 2026 @ 1:55 PM Jenna Ortega, Taika Waititi and Amy Adams at Columbia Pictures' "Klara And The Sun" New York Screening at Crosby Street Hotel on Oct. 19, 2026. (Photo by Noam Galai/Getty Images) Taika Waititi has heard what the critics are saying about his latest film “Klara and the Sun” … and he doesn’t seem too happy, no matter what his use of emojis might say. The filmmaker responded to his detractors directly on Saturday, calling them “irrelevant,” “out of touch” and “obsolete” following negative reviews of the Jenna Ortega and Amy Adams-led film. “I haven’t read a review of anything aimed at me or my peers in almost 15 years. But I do listen to the people,” the director and screenwriter wrote on Instagram. “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 added. “Irrelevant. Out of touch. Obsolete. In the bin.” His post also features a Screenrant note about the film “winning over moviegoers” despite the reviews. Released last weekend in the United States, “Klara and the Sun” currently has a 26% rating on Rotten Tomatoes (though 75% of the platform’s audience currently approves). In his review of the film for TheWrap, critic William Bibbiani said that the “defective robot movie struggles with human emotions,” adding that “Taika Waititi’s adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s sci-fi novel, about a naive robot who worships the sun, is a three-hanky movie that can’t count to three.” “We only break out the expression ’emotionally manipulative’ if the filmmaking is so clumsy that the manipulation doesn’t work. The underlying emotional and practical truths within ‘Klara and the Sun’ are bypassed in favor of cloying, overblown melodrama, and because the film ignores its own reality, including the sad stuff, it can’t make us cry,” Bibbiani wrote. “And that, more than anything else in this disappointing misfire, makes me sad.” Waititi’s comments also come after Sony Pictures Releasing reportedly scaled back the film’s international release since it’s only made $1.067 million domestic thus far, averaging just $823 per theater.