Picture Credit: Sony Pictures
Klara and the Sun has just arrived in theaters courtesy of Sony Pictures’ Columbia label, a little over a week after its world premiere at the BFI London Film Festival. Directed by Taika Waititi from a script he co-wrote with Dahvi Waller, it adapts Kazuo Ishiguro’s 2021 novel about Klara, an “Artificial Friend” bought as a companion for a sick teenager.
Jenna Ortega plays Klara, Mia Tharia is the teenager Josie, and Amy Adams plays Josie’s mother, with Steve Buscemi and Natasha Lyonne rounding out the cast. If you’re here for Ortega, you’ve got two reasons to care: this one, and the third season of Wednesday that wrapped filming last month.
Because this is a Sony release, we already know where it’ll stream in the US. The only question is when.
It hasn’t been a smooth landing. Reviews out of London were largely negative, and the film currently sits in the mid-20s on Rotten Tomatoes with a Metacritic score of 30. Sony responded by pulling the release back from a planned 1,900 or so screens to roughly 850, and opening weekend projections now sit around the $2 million mark on a budget reported at $20 million.
Netflix has been the first streaming home for Sony Pictures’ theatrical movies in the United States since 2022, with titles arriving once the theatrical and digital rental windows have run their course. They then stay on Netflix for 18 months before moving to Disney+ and Hulu.
As a 2026 release it falls under the existing US deal, not the massive global agreement announced in January, which only kicks in for movies released theatrically from 2027. You can keep tabs on every title heading our way via our Sony movies coming to Netflix in 2026 tracker.
When Will Klara and the Sun Be on Netflix in the US?
Nothing is confirmed, so everything from here on is our speculation based on how Sony has handled recent titles.
The textbook gap has long been around 120 days. Karate Kid: Legends took exactly that, as did A Big Bold Beautiful Journey and GOAT. Count 120 days from October 23rd and you land on Saturday, February 20th, 2027.
The trouble is that Sony has been breaking its own rule more and more often, and almost always with movies that underperformed:
Apply those to Klara and the Sun and you get a range from early January to late January 2027. Given the scaled-back theatrical footprint, we think a January debut is more likely than not, with February 20th as the fallback if Sony sticks to the old script.
Our prediction: late January 2027, with a wider window of January to February 2027.
Two signposts to watch. Sony hasn’t announced a digital rental date yet, but recent titles have hit PVOD 30 to 45 days after theaters, which points to late November or early December. And Netflix tends to confirm Sony dates only two to three weeks out, so a January arrival would be announced right around the new year.
What About Netflix in the UK, Canada and Elsewhere?
This is where it gets messier. The existing deal gives Netflix the first window in the US plus a handful of other regions. India and parts of Southeast Asia, such as Singapore, Malaysia and the Philippines, typically get Sony films at or around the same time as the US, and Germany is also covered.
The UK and Canada are a different story. Sony’s first streaming window in both countries sits with local rivals (Sky in the UK, Crave in Canada), so Netflix only picks up Sony films in the second window. Recent examples have taken around 18 months to two years, which would put a UK or Canadian Netflix arrival somewhere in 2028. Australia and much of Europe follow a similar pattern.
The global deal will eventually tidy all of this up, but with the rollout running territory by territory through early 2029, a 2026 release like this one is unlikely to benefit.
We’ll update this article as soon as Netflix or Sony confirms anything official.
Are you catching Klara and the Sun in theaters, or holding out for Netflix? Let us know in the comments.