Warner Bros.’ adaptation of Wuthering Heights is arriving on HBO Max on May 1st, with the film’s HBO linear premiere following the next evening at 8 p.m. ET. Directed by Emerald Fennell and starring Margot Robbie as Catherine Earnshaw and Jacob Elordi as Heathcliff, the film has had a complicated life since its theatrical release on February 13 — beloved by some, fiercely contested by others, and impossible to ignore either way.
The news
The film makes its streaming debut on HBO Max beginning May 1, with its debut on HBO linear on May 2 at 8 p.m. ET. An American Sign Language version will also stream exclusively on HBO Max, performed by ASL dubbers Leila Hanaumi and Giovanni Maucere and directed by Justin Jackerson — marking the first romance title available to stream in ASL on HBO Max with two dubbers.
The film has grossed $241 million worldwide, including about $84 million domestically and $157 million internationally, against an $80 million production budget — a healthy return that makes the streaming rollout one of the more anticipated HBO Max premieres of the year.
What to look forward to
Fennell has described her main intention as trying to “recreate the feeling of a teenage girl reading this book for the first time.” That instinct shapes everything about the film’s register — it is emotional and visceral before it is literary, prioritizing atmosphere and desire over narrative fidelity.
Anthony Willis composed the score after having worked with Fennell on Saltburn, with Charli XCX contributing an album of original songs. The lead single, “House,” featuring Welsh musician John Cale, was released alongside a music video, while “Chains of Love” dropped alongside the theatrical trailer. The soundtrack has been one of the film’s most warmly received elements across the board, with “Chains of Love” in particular taking on a life of its own well beyond the film.
The film’s Rotten Tomatoes consensus reads: “Liberally adapting Emily Brontë’s classic story with a heavy dose of carnality and chic stylization, Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights might not be the stuff of high literature but it is a visually vibrant pleasure.” David Sims of The Atlantic was among the more enthusiastic critics, calling it “a heaving, rip-snortingly carnal good time.” For viewers who enjoyed Saltburn‘s provocative sensibility and aren’t precious about the source material, this offers exactly that energy scaled up to a period epic with a bigger budget and a more famous story to desecrate.
The controversies heading into the streaming release
The film has been dogged by debate since its casting was announced in mid-2024, and those debates have not quieted since release.
The most substantive criticism concerns the character of Heathcliff. Wuthering Heights was always a commentary on race and class, yet only Andrea Arnold’s 2011 adaptation ever portrayed Heathcliff as a non-white character. Many readers have long understood Heathcliff’s racial identity as ambiguous at best — and for a significant number, as clearly intended to read as a person of color, a reading that makes his persecution and eventual revenge legible as something more than mere psychological torment.Fennell defended the casting by saying Elordi “looked exactly like the illustration of Heathcliff on the first book that I read” — a justification critics found both circular and telling of exactly which version of the story she had internalized.
The Robbie casting drew its own fire. Cathy is canonically brunette, and Fennell’s film is the first adaptation to envision her as blonde. Cathy also marries Edgar at 17 in the novel, and the film ages her up considerably — a pragmatic concession given Robbie’s age, but one that strips the character of the unsettling youth that gives her recklessness its particular charge. Fennell’s response was characteristically bold: she wanted someone with “an otherworldly power, a Godlike power, that means people lose their minds” — and that, to her, was Margot Robbie.
Then there is the question of what the film actually adapts. The entire second half of the novel is essentially absent, meaning the second half of the characters’ development is gone along with it.Fennell has been upfront about this, arguing that with a book as complex as Wuthering Heights, a full adaptation would be impossible: “I can’t say I’m making Wuthering Heights. What I can say is I’m making a version of it.”But for readers who consider the novel’s second half — with its portrait of generational trauma repeating across the next generation — to be the entire point of the book, that framing reads less like artistic humility and more like a convenient escape hatch.
Fennell leaned into the book’s reputation as a sweeping romance and created a steamy love story made for the internet era.The underlying problem, as many critics noted, is that the novel is not actually a romance. It functions more as an anti-romance — a toxic tale about two people wanting to possess each other, with nothing conventionally romantic about it despite its reputation as “the greatest love story of all time.”Fennell’s film embraces that reputation rather than interrogating it, which may be its most revealing creative choice of all.
Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian described the result as “an emotionally hollow, bodice-ripping misfire.” The audience CinemaScore landed at a B — the film found its crowd without quite winning them over.
Whether the HBO Max premiere converts any skeptics or simply gives existing fans another excuse to revisit the Charli XCX album remains to be seen. What is certain is that Fennell’s Wuthering Heights is the kind of film that keeps generating conversation precisely because it is willing to be wrong in interesting ways — and that, at minimum, is more than most adaptations of beloved novels manage.
Wuthering Heights streams on HBO Max from May 1. The HBO linear premiere is May 2 at 8 p.m. ET.
Sources：
Variety — “Wuthering Heights’ Sets HBO Max Release Date“
Deadline — “Wuthering Heights Streaming Date: When Film Hits HBO Max“
CBR — “The Real Reason Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights Adaptation Is Dividing Fans“
The Kansan — “Wuthering Heights’ leaves much to be desired, choosing aesthetics over accuracy“
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