Sightlines · reception
How "Wuthering Heights" was received
2026 · Emerald Fennell · "Wuthering Heights" on Sightlines
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 fervor.
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) fueling a parallel fight all its own.
Its footprint
The Charli XCX-scored teaser was an instant meme machine — 'Fifty Shades of Gray: 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.
Did you know? An estimated 76% of its opening-weekend audience was women — the female-driven turnout that powered its $34.8M #1 debut over Valentine's Day weekend.
Named by the director
- 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 humor 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.