Klara and the Sun Reviews: 25 Percent on Rotten Tomatoes, 81 Percent From Audiences

Taika Waititi's adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro's Klara and the Sun opened in 880 US theatres on Friday, 23 October 2026, and the reviews were in: overwhelmingly negative. Rotten Tomatoes puts it at 25 percent from 73 critic reviews as of 26 October. Metacritic has it at 30 out of 100 from 26 reviews, graded "generally unfavorable", with no positive notices among them. The same Rotten Tomatoes page records an audience score of 81 percent from more than 100 verified ratings. The opening weekend was $725,000, a per-theatre average of $823, and the film did not reach the top ten.

Related reading: Wicker Wins Over Critics and Audiences. Its $5.75 Million Opening Is the Interesting Part. · Street Fighter (2026) Arrives to a Rotten Tomatometer and a Fan-Service Split.

The reviews are the story here; the box office says how few people have seen the film to form an opinion.

What Klara and the Sun is

Waititi directed and wrote the screenplay with Dahvi Waller, adapting Ishiguro's 2021 novel. Ishiguro won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2017, and the book was published four years later. Jenna Ortega plays Klara. Amy Adams plays Chrissy, Josie's mother; Mia Tharia plays Josie; Aran Murphy plays Rick; Steve Buscemi plays Capaldi; Natasha Lyonne plays a store manager.

David Heyman, Garrett Basch and Waititi produced, with Heyday Films, 3000 Pictures, Spyglass Media Group, Defender Films and Piki Films among the production companies. The film runs 1 hour 56 minutes and is rated PG-13. Rotten Tomatoes' box office column reports a budget of $20 million, a figure Sony has not confirmed. It had its world premiere at the BFI London Film Festival on 15 October 2026, eight days before Sony Pictures Releasing put it into wide release under Columbia Pictures.

A 25 percent score from 73 reviews

Rotten Tomatoes records 25 percent, and its critics consensus reads: "Flattening the nuanced ideas of its acclaimed source material with a tonally broad approach, Klara and the Sun aims to be endearing and inspiring but winds up being cloying and twee."

Metacritic's breakdown is more lopsided than the headline number suggests. Of the 26 reviews it counts, none is positive, 12 are mixed and 14 are negative. A score of 30 with no positive notices is close to a unanimous verdict at the aggregators, even though a handful of individual critics filed warmer notices. The audience number is the exception: 81 percent from more than 100 verified ratings on Rotten Tomatoes, with a Metacritic user score of 6.0 from nine ratings, a sample too small to carry much weight.

What the critics objected to

Peter Bradshaw's Guardian review, dated 15 October, the day of the festival premiere, is among the harshest. He scored it 20 out of 100, one star, and described it as "soft-centred sci-fi-lite, simultaneously demanding we laugh at its (unfunny) humour and wipe away a tear at its pass-agg poignancy."

At the New York Times, Ben Kenigsberg gave it 30 and located the failure in point of view. "There is a sense that the filmmaker has adopted his protagonist's winsome outlook as his own," he wrote, adding that Waititi had "rendered the material incoherent." The Daily Beast's Nick Schager, at 25, called it "a wannabe-inspiring fable that proves its maker's preternatural gift for noxious sentimentality." The Boston Globe's Odie Henderson, at 38, wrote that the film "tries to cover a lot of emotional and plot-related ground, yet stumbles with every step."

The Irish Times was not much kinder at 40. Donald Clarke wrote that the film is "never as funny as it is annoying, never as touching as it is maudlin", and concluded that it was "too misconceived to establish even the most eccentric cult following."

"Never as funny as it is annoying, never as touching as it is maudlin, here is a film too misconceived to establish even the most eccentric cult following." — Donald Clarke, The Irish Times, 40/100

Read together, the notices differ in wording and agree on the charge. Bradshaw's "pass-agg poignancy", Schager's "noxious sentimentality" and Clarke's "maudlin" describe the same objection: the film asks for a feeling it has not set up.

Not every notice was a pan. Empire's Helen O'Hara gave it 60 and credited Ortega with holding the film together: "Jenna Ortega anchors a fable of love, pain and sunshine as the sort of AI that might win sceptics over", she wrote, though Ortega "can't compensate for a wildly inconsistent tone." The San Francisco Chronicle's G. Allen Johnson, at 50, found the central relationship genuinely affecting: "One can't help but respond to Klara's essential unjaded sweetness and to how her relationship with both Josie and Chrissy develops." He ended with a point that complicates his own praise: "We realize, of course, that it is a human performance, by Ortega, that is moving us."

The Playlist's Rodrigo Perez was reported by Kinolime as giving it a D+ on 20 October, writing that "It's easily Waititi's worst film" while adding that "Ortega, thankfully, fares considerably better." That verdict reached this article second-hand, and is treated accordingly.

Why audiences landed at 81 percent

The 81 percent is a real number and a weak instrument. Rotten Tomatoes audience scores are self-selected: people who sought out the film and bothered to rate it. Early in a run, the sample is whoever the marketing reached and whoever cared enough to answer. Still, 25 against 81 is an unusually wide gap for a literary adaptation, and the reviews left on the site point to a consistent set of pleasures: Ortega's physical performance, the film's visual style, and an emotional directness that critics read as manipulation.

One verified review called the film "a beautiful, live-action Japanese anime". Another said Ortega "did a phenomenal job bringing Klara to life." Those are the reactions of viewers who took the film on its own terms and found it moving.

The argument underneath the split is about adaptation. Ishiguro's novel is narrated by Klara in the first person, and the restraint of that voice is much of what the book does. A film has to externalise it. Kenigsberg's complaint names the risk exactly: if the director adopts Klara's winsome outlook, the audience loses the distance that lets the novel's sentiment be examined rather than simply felt. The critics who rejected the film describe a version that kept the warmth and dropped the frame. The audiences who embraced it describe the warmth.

That is a defensible disagreement about what an adaptation owes its source, and neither score settles it. The critics wanted Ishiguro's restraint, and the audience reviews praise the feeling that survives without it.

The opening weekend: $725,000 in 880 theatres

The $725,000 opening came from 880 theatres, an average of $823 per site, according to Rotten Tomatoes' weekend box office report, citing Box Office Mojo. The frame was led by Clayface with $24.0 million, followed by You Can See Everything at $19.5 million, Wildwood at $11.6 million, Street Fighter at $8.6 million and Wicker at $5.7 million. Klara and the Sun was not close to that group.

Five films took between $5.7 million and $24.0 million, so the weekend was not a dead market. Klara's audience was simply much smaller.

For a film with a reported $20 million budget and a wide screen count, the number is weak. Waititi's Thor films made him a bankable name, and Jojo Rabbit, his Oscar-winning film, took $33.3 million domestic. Rotten Tomatoes' box office column notes that his films outside the Thor series and Jojo Rabbit have never reached $10 million domestic.

The rest of the autumn's literary slate gives a rough sense of scale. Sense and Sensibility, which opened on 16 October, took $3.4 million in its second weekend; Whalefall, which opened the same day, took $3.2 million in its second. Those are second-weekend figures for films on different screen counts, so the comparison is not like for like. But they show the size of the audience that turned out for literary adaptations this month, and Klara's first weekend was a fraction of it.

Sony gave the film a wide release, and the opening is consistent with a short theatrical window rather than an awards campaign. That is a reading of the numbers. Nothing about the release plan beyond the date and the theatre count has been announced.

Caveats

• Scores are a snapshot. All figures were recorded on 26 October 2026 and will move as more reviews and ratings arrive.
• The audience score is not a poll. It comes from a self-selected group of verified ratings early in the run, and it is small next to the critic sample.
• The opening figure is a studio estimate. The $725,000 weekend is as reported, not audited, and the $823 per-theatre average is derived from it.
• The budget is unconfirmed. The $20 million figure comes from Rotten Tomatoes' box office column, not from Sony.
• One quote is second-hand. The Playlist's D+ reached this article through Kinolime's report, and is attributed accordingly.

What to watch

• The second weekend. A small drop would suggest the audience score is doing some work; a steep fall would confirm the opening was the whole story.
• Whether the audience score holds. 81 percent from just over 100 ratings is easy to move. Watch the number as the sample grows past a few hundred.
• The theatre count. Whether Sony holds its screen count next weekend will say something about its intentions.
• The rest of the literary slate. Sense and Sensibility and Whalefall are in the same market with the same audience, and their holds will show whether the problem is this film or the season.

Sony has not announced a streaming date or an awards campaign. The second weekend is the next number that will move.

Cover image: "Taika Waititi at the Tribeca Film Festival 2026" by CaseyJNewell, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons (the photo is from the premiere of Jail Time Records, not Klara and the Sun; it predates this film's release).