"Wuthering Heights" · reception & legacy

How "Wuthering Heights" has been received, argued over, and remembered.

The arc

Arrived in February 2026 pre-hated by Brontë purists and opened at #1 anyway with a $34.8M Valentine's weekend debut — the year's biggest opening at that point despite a mixed ~63% Rotten Tomatoes score. Five months on it's settled in as 2026's defining love-it-or-loathe-it release, adored and despised with equal fervour.

What's debated

Is Fennell's horny, campy Gothic a betrayal of Emily Brontë or exactly the point — with the casting of Jacob Elordi as the novel's explicitly dark-skinned Heathcliff (and Margot Robbie as a much-older Catherine) fuelling a parallel fight all its own.

Its footprint

The Charli XCX-scored teaser was an instant meme machine — 'Fifty Shades of Grey: 1800s version' and 'Saltburn 2' jokes everywhere — cementing the brat-to-Brontë pipeline as a genuine cultural moment. Charli's original soundtrack songs gave the film a pop afterlife well beyond the multiplex.

Where it stands

Too new for canon but already a Letterboxd litmus test — the one-star and five-star reviews are equally passionate, and both are part of the fun.

Named by the director

Influences Emerald Fennell has publicly named — the director's own word, distinct from the inferred lines of influence.

• Romeo + Juliet (1996) — Fennell called it 'completely transformative' — one of the two teenage-formative doomed romances behind her take.
• Titanic (1997) — The other film Fennell said marked her most deeply as a young teenager, a blueprint for grand doomed love.
• Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992) — Cited for its distilled Gothic atmosphere — 'the sexiness, the camp.'
• Dracula: Dead and Loving It (1995) — Named to make her point that Gothic stories can't exist without humour and camp.
• The Handmaiden (2016) — Chosen for its dampness — 'a kind of wet heat in there that you can feel.'
• Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger — Fennell cited the duo's cinema among the touchstones for her adaptation's heightened style.
• Peter Greenaway — Named alongside Powell and Pressburger as an influence on the film's lush, transgressive imagery.