Sony Pictures Drops First Trailer for Taika Waititi's Klara and the Sun, Starring Jenna Ortega

Sony Pictures has released the first trailer for Klara and the Sun, its adaptation of the bestselling novel by Nobel Prize-winning author Kazuo Ishiguro, with Academy Award winner Taika Waititi directing and writing the screenplay. The film stars Jenna Ortega as Klara, an Artificial Friend searching for the right home, and represents a high-profile bet by Sony on prestige literary IP anchored by a marquee cast and an internationally recognized creative pairing.

A High-Pedigree Package for Sony

The source material and director combination gives Sony a rare double-Nobel-and-Oscar platform to position the film as awards-season contender. Ishiguro, whose novel served as the basis for the screenplay, is a Nobel laureate; Waititi carries an Academy Award. For a studio building its theatrical slate around differentiated content, that credentialing matters — it signals a specific audience and a specific awards window, reducing the marketing guesswork that burdens original projects.

Waititi's filmography also tells distributors something about commercial expectations. His previous work — including Jojo Rabbit and Hunt for the Wilderpeople — demonstrated a consistent ability to find emotional weight inside genre and tonal hybridity. The trailer, according to early descriptions, carries Hunt for the Wilderpeople energy, suggesting Waititi is working in a register closer to his restrained, character-driven mode than his broader comedic work on Our Flag Means Death.

The Cast and Its Draws

The ensemble assembled around Ortega is built to attract multiple audience segments. Amy Adams plays Josie's mother, a fraught parental role that puts one of Hollywood's most awarded performers in direct dramatic opposition to Ortega's Klara. Natasha Lyonne appears as a manager at an artificial friend store — the commercial front end of the film's fictional AF economy. Rachel House, a Waititi regular, plays the family housekeeper Melania, while Aran Murphy, son of Cillian Murphy, plays Josie's best friend Rick. Sophia Bryant-Taukiri is cast as Josie's older sister, Sal. Steve Buscemi and Harry Greenwood are also confirmed in roles Sony has not yet disclosed.

The Competitive Stakes

Klara and the Sun enters a market where AI-themed narrative has become a crowded thematic lane. The commercial question Sony must answer is whether Waititi's grounded, humanistic approach — the film's premise centers on loyalty, family grief, and an AF's "innocent wonder" rather than technological threat — can differentiate the project from the dystopian AI properties that have saturated streaming and theatrical release schedules. Ortega's casting, following her profile rise, adds a built-in younger audience draw that Ishiguro's literary readership alone would not deliver. That combination of existing IP recognition and a bankable lead is precisely the packaging major studios have leaned on to manage theatrical risk.