Wuthering Heights continues studio Warner Bros’ impressive streak at the box office before the main launch, following a 2025 slate that included A Minecraft Movie, Final Destination Bloodlines and Weapons.
Wuthering Heights is Fennell’s third film as writer-director, following 2020’s Promising Young Woman, starring Carey Mulligan as a woman who takes revenge on the men who assaulted her friend and Saltburn, a provocative spin on Brideshead Revisited, starring Barry Keoghan as an Oxford student who becomes obsessed with a much wealthier fellow student, played by Jacob Elordi.
Promising Young Woman won Fennell the original screenplay Oscar, while Saltburn became a watercooler hit for streamer Amazon. Wuthering Heights reunites her with Elordi as well as Saltburn producer Margot Robbie, who plays Catherine in the new film.
Early projections suggested Emerald Fennell’s adaptation could recoup its $80 million production budget in its opening three days with strong US and overseas takings expected.
The titillating trailers and method-dressed promotional tour appear to have paid off, early indications are that Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights will earn back its $80 million production budget on the first weekend of release.
Projections estimate the three-day frame, which falls on Valentine’s weekend, should recoup around $50 million at the US box office where it opens across 3,600 screens and a further $40 million overseas.
Competition for the top spots in the charts is soft, with studios making way for the mammoth love story. Judicious counter-programming comes courtesy of children’s animation GOAT and murky drama Crime 101.
Fennell has stressed that the adaptation, which takes considerable liberties with Emily Brontë’s source novel, is a personal interpretation of the book, inspired by her feelings about it when she first encountered it as a teenager.
There are mixed reviews, with many US pundits praising its ambition and idiosyncrasies, while UK critics have in the main been more sceptical.
In his two-star review, the Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw called it “a 20-page fashion shoot of relentless silliness, with bodices ripped to shreds and a saucy slap of BDSM”.
Disquiet has already been voiced over the film’s intentional anachronisms, as well as the casting of Robbie and Elordi, both of whom are considerably older than the characters in the novel. Elordi’s casting met with further backlash as Heathcliff is most commonly described by Brontë as “dark-skinned”.