Taika Waititi to Direct Sony's Klara and the Sun as Next Movie

Amid speculation about when he'll return to the Star Wars universe or helm the long-awaited remake of Akira, it looks like Taika Waititi has found his next project. On Monday, reports revealed that Waititi is in negotiations to direct Klara and the Sun, a film adaptation of Never Let Me Go author Kazuo Ishiguro's 2021 bestselling novel of the same name. The film is reportedly in development at Sony's 3000 Pictures imprint, with Dahvi Waller penning the original draft of the screenplay.

Producers on the project will be Waititi, Garrett Basch, and David Heyman for Heyday Films. Ishiguro will executive produce. According to the initial reporting, Waititi was weighing his options for which movie to direct next following last year's Marvel Cinematic Universe entry Thor: Love and Thunder and this year's soccer dramedy Next Goal Wins. The report indicates that he is still set to helm his standalone Star Wars movie after Klara and the Sun.

What is Klara and the Sun about?

Klara and the Sun follows Klara, a robot girl created to prevent teenagers from becoming lonely. This is the story of how she tries to save a family of humans she lives with from heartbreak. 

"I think I've always been drawn to – you know, throughout my career to narrators who are, in one way or the other, quite a bit on the outside," Ishiguro explained during an interview with NPR. "But Klara was especially interesting for me because she doesn't bring any baggage with her. It's not like, you know, she has her value system which kind of clashes with what she finds. She's like a tabula rasa at the beginning, and she's quite childlike and very open. And so that was – you know, it's not just the way, the very restricted way, in which she actually reads the world that appealed to me. I wanted some of that childlike freshness and openness and naivety to survive all the way through the text in her. I wanted her to remain, like, a very optimistic character who has a childlike faith in the presence of something good and protective in the world, even as she learns all these other things, darker things about the human world that she occupies."

What do you think of the first details surrounding Taika Waititi's next movie? Share your thoughts with us in the comments below!

h/t: Deadline