Director Taika Waititi was the toast of the town after resurrecting the stagnant Thor series with his trademark take on the po-faced superhero in Thor: Ragnarok. The movie is still considered among the finest achievements in Marvel Cinematic Universe history. It afforded him significant creative freedom not just on its immediate follow-up, Thor: Love and Thunder, but also on his prestige play, Jojo Rabbit. Waititi ended up winning a Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar for Jojo Rabbit, but his career curiously took a hit almost immediately afterward with two major critical and commercial underperformers.
Besides Thor: Love and Thunder, which fell short of its predecessor’s box-office haul and is generally considered rather self-indulgent, Waititi directed two would-be awards contenders in the same vein as Jojo Rabbit. While that movie ended up grossing more than $90 million worldwide against a reported budget of $14 million, Waititi’s two follow-ups suffered troubled productions and tanked commercially. First out of the gate was the sports drama Next Goal Wins, which languished on the shelf for over a year before grossing $18 million worldwide against a reported budget of $14 million.
Waititi’s latest film, on the other hand, has delivered such a poor performance at the box office that its distributor, Sony, stopped reporting its grosses after two weeks. The movie in question is based on a sci-fi novel by the Nobel Prize-winning Kazuo Ishiguro. It features the six-time Oscar nominee Amy Adams and the ingénue Jenna Ortega, the star of Netflix’s most-watched original series, Wednesday. Despite the talent involved, the film opened to poor reviews, which reportedly prompted Sony to cancel its wide release and global rollout. The movie eventually debuted in a little under 900 theaters on October 23.
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Movies/Science Fiction/Survival Assessment
Collider Survival Assessment Which Sci-Fi World Would You Survive? 8 questions · 5 worlds · one honest verdict
Five of the great screen futures, and not one of them is built for comfort. Answer eight questions about instinct, loyalty and the line you would cross, and the scan will tell you which one you would still be standing in. Worlds in range
▦︎The Matrix
◈︎Mad Max
◑︎Blade Runner
▲︎Dune
✦︎Star Wars
Question 01 of 08INSTINCT
The world as you know it ends overnight. What is your first move? No wrong answer. There is a wrong hesitation.
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Question 02 of 08RESOURCE
You can stockpile exactly one thing. What is it? Choose carefully. You are not getting a second run.
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Question 03 of 08THREAT
Which kind of enemy scares you the most? Be honest about what keeps you up.
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Question 04 of 08AUTHORITY
How do you handle the people in charge? Every world has them. Even the ones that pretend otherwise.
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Question 05 of 08ENVIRONMENT
Pick the place you would rather wake up in: You will be there a while.
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Question 06 of 08ALLIANCE
Who do you want standing next to you? Pick one. You only get one.
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Question 07 of 08MORALITY
Which line would you cross to survive? Everybody crosses one.
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Question 08 of 08PURPOSE
What are you really fighting for? Last question. Make it count.
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Scan completeYou would survive
▦︎ The Matrix The Resistance, Zion You take the red pill, you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.
You would survive The Matrix because you were never fully sold on the version of reality you were handed. You notice the seams. You ask the second question. In a world built to keep people comfortable and incurious, that instinct is the whole fight, and it is why Morpheus would have found you long before you found him. From the Collider file
The Wachowskis’ 1999 film won four Academy Awards, including Visual Effects and Film
Editing.
Bullet time was shot with a rig of roughly 120 still cameras firing in sequence around the
actors.
Keanu Reeves trained in martial arts for about four months before a frame was shot,
recovering from neck surgery the whole time.
It opened the same year as Fight Club and eXistenZ, in a run of films about not trusting the
world in front of you.
Red pill energy Pattern spotter Built to question
◈︎ Mad Max The Wasteland Oh, what a day. What a lovely day.
You would survive the Wasteland because you do not waste energy mourning the world that ended. You move, you improvise, and you are very good with whatever is bolted to the thing in front of you. Furiosa would let you drive. That is not a compliment anybody earns easily. From the Collider file
Mad Max: Fury Road won six Academy Awards in 2016, more than any other film that year.
George Miller storyboarded the entire film as roughly 3,500 panels before there was a
script.
The chase was shot almost entirely practical in the Namib Desert, with real vehicles and
real stunt performers.
Anya Taylor-Joy and Chris Hemsworth carried the prequel, Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, in 2024.
Keeps moving Improviser Good with engines
◑︎ Blade Runner Los Angeles, 2049 All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.
You would survive 2049 because you know how to be small in a very loud city. You keep your head down, you do the job, and you hold onto one private thing that belongs only to you. That quiet stubbornness is exactly what both Deckard and K run on, and it is what keeps either of them going when the case stops making sense. From the Collider file
Blade Runner 2049 won Roger Deakins his first Oscar for cinematography, on his fourteenth
nomination.
The film also took Best Visual Effects, 35 years after Ridley Scott’s 1982 original.
Villeneuve shot it on large-format film and kept the fog and rain practical on set wherever
he could.
Three short films by Luke Scott and Shinichiro Watanabe bridge the 30-year gap between the
two movies.
Keeps her head down Private Noir soul
▲︎ Dune Arrakis Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.
You would survive Arrakis because you think in decades while everyone around you thinks in weeks. You read the room, you learn the customs, you wait. The desert does not reward speed. It rewards people who understand that patience is a weapon, which is the one lesson the Fremen never had to be taught. From the Collider file
Denis Villeneuve’s Dune won six Academy Awards in 2022, including Cinematography and
Original Score.
Hans Zimmer turned down Christopher Nolan’s Tenet so he could score Dune instead.
Dune: Part Two arrived in 2024 and brought in Austin Butler, Florence Pugh and Christopher
Walken.
David Lynch’s 1984 version and Alejandro Jodorowsky’s unmade one are both their
own legends by now.
Plays the long game Reads the room Patient
✦︎ Star Wars A Galaxy Far, Far Away Rebellions are built on hope.
You would survive the galaxy because you never try to survive it alone. You collect people. You end up in the middle of other folks’ problems and you stay anyway. Every version of this story, from the Falcon’s crew to the Ghost’s, runs on somebody exactly like that holding the group together. From the Collider file
The 1977 original won six Academy Awards plus a special achievement award for sound effects.
John Williams’ score was recorded by the London Symphony Orchestra and became the
best-selling symphonic film soundtrack ever.
Andor took the galaxy somewhere colder and earned Emmy nominations for drama series in both
seasons.
The saga now runs across eleven feature films and a growing shelf of series on Disney+.
Collects people Shows up Hope merchant
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Here’s How Much the Movie Has Grossed at the Box Office
We’re talking, of course, about Klara and the Sun, which made $701,000 in its opening weekend and $157,000 in its second. By November 5, Sony stopped reporting the film’s daily grosses. The movie’s total global haul stands at less than $3 million against a budget that has been reported to be as high as $44 million. Its final daily haul was reported to be just over $13,000, which represents a per-theater average of just $15.
Klara and the Sun received poor reviews and is now sitting at a 26% score on the aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes. The site’s 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 cloying and twee.” In a rare instance of a filmmaker publicly lashing out at critics, Waititi posted a note on Instagram slamming those who’ve disliked his movie.
You’ll have to wait for Klara and the Sun to hit the PVOD market to check it out. Stay tuned to Collider for more updates.
