Sony Pictures released the first trailer Monday for Klara and the Sun, Taika Waititi’s long-delayed adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s bestselling novel, confirming an October 23 theatrical release. The footage gives audiences their clearest look yet at Jenna Ortega as Klara, a solar-powered “Artificial Friend” built to ease loneliness in children, and at Amy Adams as a guarded mother who buys the robot for her ailing daughter.
Sony’s 3000 Pictures bought the screen rights to Ishiguro’s 2021 novel in 2020, and Dahvi Waller began writing the script the following year. Waititi later reworked much of that draft himself, and the two now share screenplay credit.
Mia Tharia plays Josie, the teenage girl whose unspecified illness drives the story, with Aran Murphy as her friend Rick and Steve Buscemi and Natasha Lyonne rounding out the supporting cast. Ishiguro serves as an executive producer alongside Gary Barber, Alex G. Scott, Jeffrey Clifford and Rosie Alison, while David Heyman and Garrett Basch produced with Waititi.
The trailer leans into the family’s tension rather than the robot-companion premise alone. Adams’ character warns Klara she remains “under warranty” and could be returned without hesitation, a line that signals the film will push past its premise of artificial companionship into harder questions about grief and trust.
Waititi has described the adaptation as deceptively difficult to write, telling Vanity Fair that picking apart the novel’s relationships only multiplied the complications the deeper he went. He set the film’s look in a 1960s-inflected palette rather than gleaming future tech, a choice meant to ground the story’s alternate timeline, in which, per Waititi, society quietly lost access to the internet.
The project marks Waititi’s first film since 2023’s Next Goal Wins, which struggled at the box office, and arrives after two years of release delays. It also lands at a pivotal moment for his commercial standing: his Marvel work cooled with Thor: Love and Thunder, and he has faced growing skepticism from audiences who once embraced his earlier comedies.
For Ortega, the role offers a notable change of pace from Wednesday, the Netflix series that made her a star, and could position her for her first major dramatic showcase outside genre work. Industry attention will likely turn to whether Sony sends the film to the Toronto International Film Festival, the launchpad that helped propel Waititi’s Jojo Rabbit to multiple Oscar nominations in 2019.
