There’s no question: This is not the Wuthering Heights Emily Brontë wrote. But Emerald Fennell (Promising Young Woman, Saltburn) never intended that.

Ahead of the release of Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights,” (yes, the quotation marks are part of the title), the English filmmaker has dropped controversial clues that her film adaptation would reject much of what Brontë fans might anticipate. In casting Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi as damned lovers Catherine and Heathcliff, Fennell ignited outrage from fans who decried the Barbie star as too old for her role and Elordi too white for his.

The movie’s ad campaign leaned into romance-novel tropes, featuring posters of the two locked in an embrace, on the verge of kissing, with the tagline “Come undone.” Then came assurances that Fennell’s film would be willfully anachronistic from the book’s late 18th-century setting, as Charli XCX teased the film’s dance-pop soundtrack, and production stills revealed a synthetic latex-like dress, a shimmery negligee, and teeny rose-colored glasses that evoke a far more modern feel.

Finally, in pre-release interviews for “Wuthering Heights,” Fennell spoke to her approach in adapting a book “as dense and complicated and difficult” as the Brontë classic. “I can’t say I’m making Wuthering Heights. It’s not possible,” she told Fandango. “What I can say is I’m making a version of it. There’s a version that I remembered reading that isn’t quite real. And there’s a version where I wanted stuff to happen that never happened. And so it is “Wuthering Heights,” and it isn’t. But really, I’d say that any adaptation of a novel, especially a novel like this, should have quotation marks around it.”

After all of this, it should surprise no one that Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights” is radically different from Brontë’s. The question is not if the film is faithful to the book, or even better than it. The question is, does this film work on its own terms, as a half-remembered fantasy of wild, enviable romance? And the answer is simply: No.

“Wuthering Heights” radically reimagines Catherine and Heathcliff.

The bones of our famed protagonists’ story remain: Catherine and Heathcliff meet as children in the moors of West Yorkshire, England, where she’s the spoiled daughter of a drunken landowner, and he’s a poor boy brusquely adopted to be raised alongside her. They share a wild nature in their remote surroundings, but as they grow, Catherine longs for luxury, which her gruff crush with no societal standing can’t promise. She breaks both their hearts by accepting the proposal of proper, aristocratic gentleman Edgar Linton (Shazad Latif), from the estate next door, which spurs Heathcliff to run away. Upon his return to Yorkshire five years later, he is rich, dashing, and determined to make a mess of Catherine’s life, for better or worse.

However, despite the familiar framework, the dynamic of Catherine and Heathcliff in Fennell’s film feels more like The Princess Bride than Wuthering Heights. For one thing, Heathcliff’s cruelty is considerably softened. Like Westley, the sweet stable boy, he will suffer any abuse if it means being close to his blonde ladylove. In particular, Heathcliff will endure a violent whipping from Catherine’s father, which gives the boy a chance to prove his immovable dedication to her.

Heathcliff’s own violence and wrath in adulthood are channeled by Elordi into smoldering and brooding, with a tame frisson of kink, whether he’s forcefully gripping Catherine’s mouth or later degrading his bride, Edgar’s ward Isabella (Alison Oliver) with pet play. Meanwhile, Catherine is a beautiful brat who, in the blink of an eye, goes from a rosy-cheeked child to a picture-perfect doll of a woman. So, of course, Fennell cast Barbie.

Draped in meticulously crafted skirts and dresses in bold reds and whites and corseted into an impossible waist, Robbie looks like a fashion doll, especially as she marries into wealth via Edgar. This metaphor is made blatant as Isabella presents her new sort-of sister-in-law with a doll made in her likeness, complete with a giant dollhouse that resembles their shared home, Thrushcross Grange. Yes, Catherine has achieved all the luxuries she dreamed of, but now she feels trapped, a pretty plaything in a dollhouse. The dream is not what she hoped.

“Wuthering Heights” is juvenile in its provocations.

To kick things off, two evocative sounds play over the film’s opening credits. One is the rustling of fabric, the other a man groaning, an ambiguous preview of an imminent scene of sex or violence.

The intensity of both sounds grows to reveal not a sexual scenario, but a man being hung at a public execution. However, Fennell still blends sex and violence here. A young Catherine (Charlotte Mellington) thrills at the depravity of it, while Fennell is sure to include a close-up of the dead man’s “stiffy,” obvious even through his pants. Such twisted melding of themes will thread throughout “Wuthering Heights,” but in ways more trashy than transgressive.

Brontë fans might clutch their pearls that Fennell has not just a sex scene between Heathcliff and Catherine, but a montage of them, spanning from beds to carriages to the sweeping plains between their estates. And yet, while these scenes have the iconography of classic romance novels — the rich settings, the posh clothes, the forbidden attraction, the beautiful characters on the cover feigning elation — they fall flat. While Robbie is rigorous in bringing Catherine’s ire and yearning to life, and Elordi is strong and seething, the pair have all the chemistry of Barbie and Ken dolls bumping rubber when they collide.

Perhaps to add Saltburn-like spice, BDSM is worked into various love scenes, bringing horse bridles, shackles, and a metal collar into sex games of degradation. This makes the depravity of the novel more playful than dark. Now, Heathcliff, who comes off like a towering Dom, is less threatening, as his violence is channeled through consensual kink. Yet this depiction of BDSM still feels half-hearted next to more successfully sexy and psychologically provocative films like Babygirl and Pillion.

The race-bending in “Wuthering Heights” is a problem Fennell created.

Heathcliff’s racial identity has been studied by Brontë scholars due to the author’s descriptions of his “dark-skinned” appearance, which is why Elordi’s casting incensed some fans of the novel. However, it’s not Heathcliff’s casting alone that becomes problematic in Fennell’s version. Perhaps the director looked to Bridgerton for inspiration, both in the show’s colorblind casting and barrage of sex scenes that have fueled debates on historical accuracy for the period. Fennell not only casts both of her romantic leads with white actors, but casts actors of color in the roles of Edgar and Nelly (Hong Chau), characters who are regarded in the film as less desirable than the protagonists, instead assigned roles of boring cuckold and bitter old maid.

In addition, the film’s cinematography and set design fetishize white skin. Following the childhood scene of Catherine consoling Heathcliff over his whipping by her father, the scene dissolves from the bloody, clothed back of a boy to the bared back of a man (Elordi), striped with whiplash scars. Cinematographer Linus Sandgren offers a close-up, leering over Heathcliff’s scars as if these are proof of his love — sweaty, plump, and terrible. Perhaps Fennell feared such fetishizing would be problematic if Heathcliff were “dark-skinned” as Brontë wrote. But she doubles down with this painting of whiteness as desirable with Catherine’s skin room.

After their wedding, Edgar is giddy to show Catherine the bedroom he designed for her, painted in the “most beautiful color,” that of her face. It’s not just white flesh or flushed cheeks that Edgar has had recreated. The room is lined with vinyl-padded panels, each bearing birthmarks and light blue veins translucent beneath the faux skin. Far from romantic, the gesture is repulsive, and only becomes more so when an intruding Heathcliff licks the wall as if it were his beloved’s flesh. And in this, it becomes clear how much of Brontë’s novel Fennell ignored or stripped away to make her version. And what is left?

As an admirer of Promising Young Woman and Saltburn, I was cautiously optimistic about Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights.” Adaptations are never what the book was, because the book is different depending on who reads it. This is why I like seeing movie adaptations of novels I loved and hated, because it’s like getting to walk around in someone else’s brain, seeing the story as they did. However, Fennell’s adaptation goes both too far and not far enough.

By slicing the book in half and cutting loose a clutch of relatives, she’s simplified the story to focus on the love between Heathcliff and Catherine. But for all the substance she’s cut away, only style has been put in its place. And it’s not enough to make this “Wuthering Heights” feel full or affecting. Instead of a cohesive re-imagining or even a titillating romance, “Wuthering Heights” feels like a passionate but incoherent collage of teenage lust and rebellion, the kind better suited to a high school locker than a movie theater.

Wuthering Heights opens in theaters on Feb. 13.

By Chris Snellgrove
| Published 27 seconds ago

Starfleet Academy recently aired an episode (“Series Acclimation Mil”) dedicated to Deep Space Nine, one that sought to definitively explain what happened to Captain Benjamin Sisko. The episode served shockingly well as a tribute to this iconic Trek show and Avery Brooks, the legendary performer who originally brought Sisko to life. However, what most fans don’t realize is that a major plot point of this episode goes against the wishes Brooks explicitly expressed over 30 years ago.

In the Deep Space Nine series finale, Sisko tackles Gul Dukat, sending both of them on a lethal fall into Bajor’s Fire Caves; however, Sisko is saved from death by the Prophets, who bring him to live with them inside the wormhole. The show was originally going to leave it completely ambiguous as to whether Sisko would ever return, but at Avery Brooks’ insistence, the writers added Sisko promising that he would eventually come back. Starfleet Academy (beware spoilers, cadets!) confirmed that Sisko never returned, though, meaning that the episode dedicated to Brooks’ character just completely ignored his final request for Sisko.

From Man To Prophet

Some important context: towards the end of Deep Space Nine, Captain Sisko had married Kasidy Yates, and they conceived a child shortly before his final mission. Originally, the writers of the DS9 episode “What You Leave Behind” wanted to make it clear that Sisko would become a full-time Prophet in the wormhole and that he would never get to see his family ever again. This was meant to pay off a previous warning from his Prophet mother that if Sisko were to marry Yates, he “would know nothing but sorrow.”

Accordingly, they shot a final scene with Sisko and Yates where he told her he would never return; however, Avery Brooks soon told Deep Space Nine showrunner Ira Steven Behr that he didn’t like the scene because he didn’t like his character being a Black man who leaves his pregnant Black wife to raise their child alone, feeling like this had negative cultural connotations. 

At Brooks’ request, the writers gave Sisko an iconic response to his wife asking when he would return: “It’s hard to say. Maybe a year, maybe yesterday. But I will be back.” To this, a faithful Kasidy Yates gave her hopeful response: “And I will be waiting.”

The Mystery Of Sisko’s Fate

While Deep Space Nine was set in the 24th century, Starfleet Academy (itself a Discovery spinoff) takes place in the 32nd century. When the holographic cadet SAM investigates the mystery of Sisko’s disappearance, she verifies that, according to Starfleet records, Sisko never actually returned at any point in the last 800 years. Eventually, she even talks to Jake Sisko (who may be an interactive hologram, a visiting Prophet, or something else altogether), and he confirms that while his father was metaphorically “always there,” Sisko never returned in a corporeal form.

In this way, Starfleet Academy ultimately ignored Avery Brooks’ final wishes concerning his character. The writers retroactively confirmed that Sisko did, indeed, leave his son, his wife, and his unborn child behind forever to become a full-time Prophet. Admittedly, the writers didn’t have much of a choice (Brooks is fully retired from acting and has zero interest in returning to Trek), but it’s notably weird that the episode intended to honor Sisko as a character was built on dishonoring the wishes of his actor.

Did Jake Sisko Keep Lying For 800 Years?

Of course, the truth might not be that cut and dry: there’s a chance that Sisko really did return and Starfleet never found out about it. Unless he or Kasidy Yates told somebody, how would anybody actually know? The Prophets could theoretically return him with an entirely new face, allowing him to walk around Bajor and around the entire galaxy without being recognized.

If this happened, then Jake likely knew about it and chose not to reveal the truth to anyone. This includes SAM, which might be why (despite their rapport) he seems cagey about discussing anything tangible about his father, a man who “never really left us.” This is couched as a metaphor, but what if Sisko really did return to his family and never left again?

It’s fitting, somehow, that Star Trek fans must decide for themselves what happened to Benjamin Sisko: did he remain a Prophet forever or secretly return to his family as promised? What you believe happened to this iconic character is ultimately a matter of personal faith. What could be more fitting for a Star Trek character who became the immortal savior of an entire alien race?

The Super Bowl isn’t just about touchdowns — it’s also Hollywood’s most expensive movie night.

As millions tune in for Super Bowl 2026, studios seize the moment to unveil new trailers, betting that nothing sells a blockbuster quite like debuting it in the middle of America’s biggest TV event.

So, what can we expect during this year’s Big Game? Movie fans are in for a stacked lineup of first looks and TV spots. According to Variety, Disney is putting all its weight behind The Mandalorian and Grogu, which already has a teaser in theaters now and is slated to bring Star Wars back to the Super Bowl stage once again.

Steven Spielberg’s Disclosure Day and animated tentpoles like The Super Mario Galaxy Movie and Minions 3 are all reported to have new footage during the broadcast.

Horror fans should be on the lookout for Scream 7, and it appears Lionsgate has spent on a pre-game ad spot for the Michael Jackson biopic, Michael. Beyond these, rumors are swirling about other potential Super Bowl weekend appearances by Pixar films Toy Story 5 and Hoppers, though nothing is yet guaranteed.

Yoshi faces off against a T. rex in The Super Mario Galaxy Movie

All Super Mario fans know that Yoshi is small but mighty. Case in point: the latest TV spot for The Super Mario Galaxy Movie, which features Yoshi going toe to toe with a giant T. rex.

It’s the Minions vs. a very bad bunny in Minions & Monsters

Gen Z’s favorite little freaks (aka the Minions) are back to cause even more chaos in Minions & Monsters. This time: They’re summoning monsters because why not! There’s a cute little green guy, a scary-looking blue guy, and one very bad bunny (not to be confused with the Bad Bunny). Oh, and there’s a Blackpink needle drop! How you like that?

Brad Pitt is Cliff Booth…again!

Did the world need a sequel to Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood? No, not really. But are we getting one anyway? Absolutely. Brad Pitt reprises his standout role as Hollywood stuntman Cliff Booth in Netflix’s The Adventures of Cliff Booth, coming to the streamer sometime soon. It looks like it’s going to be a wild ride.

Let The Mandalorian and Grogu show you the way

Baby Yoda Grogu is back, and he’s on the big screen. The Mandalorian and Grogu is set to release in theaters over Memorial Day Weekend, on May 22.

Steven Spielberg returns to original sci-fi with Disclosure Day

Steven Spielberg returns with the original sci-fi event film, Disclosure Day, which imagines a world on the verge of undeniable proof that humans are not alone in the universe — and the fear that comes with it.

Ghostface is back in Scream 7

Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell) thought she’d finally escaped her past, but when a new Ghostface killer strikes her quiet town and targets her daughter (Isabel May), the nightmare begins again. In Scream 7, Sidney is pulled back into the horror she knows all too well.

Will she end the bloodshed once and for all? We’ll have to find out when the film hits theaters later this month.

Supergirl reveals Krypto as a puppy and also Krypton

DC has cleverly prepped a Krypto-forward Supergirl trailer to air during the Puppy Bowl. You also get a glimpse at Krypton, but we know what you’re all here for.

Project Hail Mary gets a final look

Project Hail Mary, a Ryan Gosling-led sci-fi movie based on a 2021 best-selling novel, dropped an extended trailer. In the preview, we see Gosling’s Ryland Grace bonding with a rocky-looking Alien (named Rocky) as they attempt to save their respective worlds.

We’ll be updating this with all of the latest trailers, so be sure to check back throughout the night.