This is not an attempt to scold Emerald Fennell for perceived liberties in her upcoming adaptation of Wuthering Heights. We haven’t seen it. What is of interest here is the brilliance of the prerelease marketing campaign.
Warner Bros’ translation of a Gothic romance from the mid-Victorian era is, half a year before its arrival, on St Valentine’s Day, already the most-discussed film of 2026. Wuthering Heights is the new Barbie. If they moved it back five months to collide with Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey we could have ourselves a ... Wutherssey? Odyssing? Okay, that really doesn’t work. But you get the idea.
A large part of the controversy stems from unique and irrational antagonism towards the director in the online bear pit. There was some evidence of this when Fennell won an Oscar for Promising Young Woman. There was a lot more when Saltburn, her saucy take on the country-house drama, evolved into a cult hit after a softish theatrical release.
The content in both films was provocative, but few would have cared so much if Fennell didn’t seem so baldly posh.
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It’s a funny thing. Only a fool would deny that the arts are increasingly the preserve of the well-off. But few get in such a state about the dozens of male American directors from unimaginably wealthy backgrounds. It seems to be different if you’re an English woman who progressed from Marlborough College to Greyfriars, in Oxford. Do any reviewers care where Noah Baumbach went to school?
That lurking hostility nudged the door open when, last September, Fennell announced the leads for her assault on Emily Brontë’s great novel. The horrible phrase “book accurate” now pollutes online discussion of adaptations. Nobody much gave a toss when, for his classic 1939 version, William Wyler scrapped whole acres of Brontë’s plot. But 21st-century book-accurate zealots blew a gasket at the news that Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi were to play Cathy and Heathcliff.
It mattered that they were significantly older than the lovers when, in the source, they first meet. It mattered a lot more that Elordi was white. Over the past decade or so the reasonable argument that the rugged Heathcliff, often regarded as Romani, could be black has, among many younger readers, evolved into a certainty that he’s a person of colour. Fennell was therefore “race swapping”. Few of these folks seemed concerned that she had cast Hong Chau, an American of Vietnamese descent, as Nelly Dean, the robust Yorkshire housekeeper.
“There was one Instagram comment that said the casting director should be shot,” Kharmel Cochrane, who occupies that very post, replied. “But just wait till you see it, and then you can decide whether you want to shoot me or not.”
Every successive bulletin has further upped the temperature. In early August, one (1) website reported from a test screening in Dallas. Apparently the film was “full of salacious detours that serve shock value”. The reports of the report (like this report of reports of reports) had much fun with the suggestion that Fennell’s film begins with a hanged man ejaculating and a nun fondling his tumescent chaphood.
The tabloids faked outrage. The Daily Telegraph commissioned an article that ran under the headline “A woke Wuthering Heights reboot is another tedious attempt at provocation”. What is “woke” about nuns groping hanged men? Didn’t the internet just identify the casting of Heathcliff as an assault on wokery?
Why did Fennell “have to take a chainsaw to the English Canon”? the Telegraph article continued. What are we doing here? Nobody (bar a few good burghers of northern Texas) has yet seen the bleeding film.
Last week a teaser arrived to keep the outrage boiling. A suggestion of the original tunes by Charli XCX. Elordi with no shirt on. Someone sticking their finger in the mouth of a dead fish. The promo did everything the distributors could have hoped for: it drove the watching world insane.
Does such online chatter translate into box-office success? Not always. But Fennell and her colleagues have, at least, managed to rectify a problem with the Saltburn release. In that case the controversy emerged after the film had left cinemas. With Wuthering Heights she has got people talking months in advance. It feels as if even those who hate all they’ve heard will still be curious to see the thing.
If this Wuthering Heights does turn out to be a deranged, sexed-up, wildly violent deconstruction, like something by the late Ken Russell, that is surely preferable to a drably faithful walk-through of a text that has been so adapted more often than is healthy.
“It’s just a book,” Fennell’s casting director ventured. Hear and, indeed, hear!
