Jenna Ortega and Amy Adams lead Sony’s Kazuo Ishiguro adaptation into a crowded weekend after a rough London Film Festival premiere.
Taika Waititi has never opened a movie with reviews this bad. Klara and the Sun, his adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro‘s 2021 novel, arrives in theaters Friday with a Rotten Tomatoes score in the low 20s, 25 percent as of Boxoffice Pro’s weekend report, after a rough premiere at the BFI London Film Festival on Oct. 15. That is well below anything else on his resume, and it sets up a hard weekend for Sony.
The Film
Jenna Ortega plays Klara, an Artificial Friend chosen to keep company with Josie (Mia Tharia), a sick teenage girl. Amy Adams plays Josie’s mother, Chrissie, whose quiet desperation pushes the story somewhere much darker. Aran Murphy, Steve Buscemi, Natasha Lyonne, Rachel House, Harry Greenwood and Sophia Bryant-Taukiri round out the cast. Waititi wrote the script with Dahvi Waller, and the film runs 1 hour 56 minutes. Simon Baker was cast as Josie’s father, Paul, but his scenes were cut.
Why Critics Pushed Back
Ishiguro’s novel is narrated almost entirely by a machine learning what love and grief look like from the outside, and its power is in what Klara cannot understand. The early reviews argue that Waititi, whose comic sensibility made What We Do in the Shadows and Jojo Rabbit, keeps pushing that quiet book toward quirk. We will have our own review once we have screened it. On the London carpet, at least, the cast made a strong case for the film; see every look from the BFI premiere.
Boxoffice Pro’s long-range forecast has Klara opening between $6 million and $10 million, and its latest weekend report says tracking has slipped into single digits. That puts it in a crowded Friday. DC’s R-rated Clayface is the frontrunner for No. 1, Laika’s stop-motion Wildwood and Sacha Baron Cohen’s Ali G: Who Iz I? open the same day, and Street Fighter is in its second weekend. Ortega has carried big openings before, including Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, but those came with genre built in. This is a literary adaptation with no franchise behind it, and how it holds will say a lot about whether star power can still outrun reviews.
Watch the Trailer
Klara and the Sun opens in theaters Friday, Oct. 23, from Columbia Pictures and Sony Pictures Releasing. Watch the official trailer below.
