Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights dropped on HBO Max on May 1, and within 24 hours it was the number one film in the world across 32 countries. The same movie carries a 58 percent Rotten Tomatoes critic score and a 76 percent audience score, which is the cleanest split you will see all year between people paid to write about cinema and people who clicked play on a Friday night with snacks.
If you have avoided the discourse since the February 13 theatrical release, here is the situation. Margot Robbie plays Catherine Earnshaw. Jacob Elordi plays Heathcliff. The film grossed 242 million dollars on an 80 million budget. Runtime is 136 minutes, rating is R for sexual content, soundtrack is an entire Charli XCX companion album recorded during the Brat tour. None of those sentences would have made sense to anyone reading Emily Bronte in 1847, which is sort of the point.
The Number 32 Means Something
HBO Max says Wuthering Heights hit the top of streaming charts in 32 countries on day one. JustWatch had it at number five in the United States, sitting between Bugonia and The Housemaid, which is a sentence that should not exist but does. The streaming debut is now feeding a second wave of takes from people who refused to pay for a ticket but will absolutely write 1200 words about a movie they watched in pajamas.
This is the same streaming machine that just got used to a 100 percent Rotten Tomatoes score on Apple TV’s Widow’s Bay, except in reverse. Critics hated Wuthering Heights first, audiences showed up anyway, and now the algorithm is doing victory laps in 32 time zones.
What Fennell Actually Made
Emerald Fennell, who previously directed Promising Young Woman and Saltburn, has been very clear about what this film is and is not. In her own words, she did not adapt the novel because the novel cannot be adapted. What she made is a version of it. Specifically, she said her goal was to recreate “the feeling of a teenage girl reading this book for the first time.” That is a real quote and it tells you everything.
The film is heavy on style, light on the original novel’s twin engines of class and race. Fennell engages with love and revenge, which is the romance-novel half of Wuthering Heights. She does not engage with the part where Heathcliff is described as a dark-skinned outsider exploited by a Yorkshire family who treat him like a stable hand. Casting Jacob Elordi, a six-foot-five white Australian, as Heathcliff was the first controversy. Casting Margot Robbie, who is closer to forty than to Catherine’s textual mid-twenties, was the second. The marketing pitch of “horny gothic romance” was the third.
The Critics Versus Everyone Else
Robbie Collin at the Daily Telegraph gave it five out of five and called it “resplendently lurid, oozy and wild.” Peter Bradshaw at the Guardian called it “an emotionally hollow, bodice-ripping misfire.” User scores on letterboxd range from 1 out of 10 to 90 out of 100. The Rotten Tomatoes consensus is the most diplomatic assessment ever written. It calls the film a visually striking pleasure that is not exactly high literature, which is critic for “we did not love it but our nieces will.”
The audience-critic gap is the actual story. 18 percentage points is a big swing for a major studio release, and it tracks a pattern Fennell already established with Saltburn. Her movies are not for film students. They are for people who like sex, fashion, and a soundtrack you can put on at a dinner party. Wuthering Heights is a 136-minute Charli XCX music video with literary aspirations, and that is either the best or worst thing you have ever heard depending on which side of 35 you are on.
The Charli XCX Album Is Doing the Heavy Lifting
About the soundtrack. Fennell approached Charli XCX in December 2024 to write a song. Charli read the screenplay, decided to write an album instead, and recorded the whole thing during her 2025 Brat tour. The lead single “House” featuring John Cale dropped November 10. “Chains of Love” followed three days later. “Wall of Sound” hit January 16, “Always Everywhere” arrived on the film’s release date. The album debuted at number one in the UK.
The soundtrack is now doing more cultural work than the film. It travels independently. People who refuse to watch the movie are still on Spotify with the album. Compare this to Kneecap’s Fenian album, which beat a UK terror charge and hit 82 on Metacritic in the same week, or Lana Del Rey’s Bond theme for the new 007 game, where the music outpaces the visual product it was attached to. Soundtracks are becoming the durable artifact. The film is the trailer.
Why This Is the May 2026 Streaming Moment
HBO Max needed a hit. The platform spent April watching Netflix dominate the conversation with reality TV and live events, and it needed a prestige-adjacent property that would chart. Wuthering Heights is that property. It comes pre-loaded with a brand name from 1847, a director who can sell a movie on her own face, two leads who exist on the same vision boards as everyone aged 18 to 34, and a soundtrack with Spotify monthly listeners in the eight figures.
The fact that it is also being torn apart by people who actually read Bronte is, from a streaming-metrics perspective, a feature. Discourse drives clicks. Critics pretending to be shocked drives clicks. People defending the film online drives clicks. The film has been on HBO Max for 48 hours, and it is currently outperforming projects with five times the marketing spend. A24 built 30,000 square feet of liminal hell to launch The Backrooms on May 29, and they are going to need every square foot of that to compete with what Robbie and Elordi are pulling in pajamas this weekend.
The Adaptation Question Will Not Die
The argument that Fennell butchered the novel is technically correct and also slightly beside the point. Wuthering Heights has been adapted at least 17 times since 1920. Every version is a remix. The 2011 Andrea Arnold version was praised for its faithfulness and made 1.6 million dollars. Faithful adaptations of Bronte do not pay the bills. Horny ones do.
What Fennell has done is admit out loud what every adaptation of a novel actually is. Director picks the parts they like, soundtrack covers the rest, audience shows up if the leads are hot. The novel survives. John Travolta took 30 years to write his own book and is now directing the adaptation himself, which is one way to maintain creative control. The other way is to write the source material in 1847 and let the dead author take whatever happens.
Pudgy Cat verdict. Watch it for the costumes. Stay for the Charli XCX. Read the novel separately. The two things are not in competition unless you make them be.
🐾 Visit the Pudgy Cat Shop for prints and cat-approved goodies, or find our illustrated books on Amazon.
Leave a Reply