Releasing a savage love story on Valentine’s Day weekend sounds like a dare, and that’s exactly the energy in the first teaser for Wuthering Heights. Warner Bros. unveiled the preview on September 3, 2025, introducing Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi as Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff—two people pulled together by desire and torn apart by class, pride, and revenge. The images are stark, the moors feel endless, and the tone is unashamedly feverish.
A fiercer Wuthering Heights for a new generation
Emerald Fennell writes and directs the film from Emily Brontë’s 1847 novel, and the teaser makes her intentions plain: this isn’t a polite period piece. It’s volatile. We hear an all-or-nothing line—“I can follow you like a dog to the end of the world”—and see charged, intimate flashes that underline how quickly devotion slides into destruction for Cathy and Heathcliff. The Yorkshire moors aren’t just scenery here; they’re a pressure cooker.
Fennell’s work has always favored sharp edges over soft focus. She won an Academy Award for her script for Promising Young Woman and followed that with Saltburn, a glossy thriller about obsession, class, and transgression. Those themes map cleanly onto Brontë’s novel, which took the gothic and turned it personal: a foundling outsider fixated on the only person who ever chose him, and a woman who chafes at the life she’s supposed to accept. Expect Fennell to hold eye contact with the uglier feelings—jealousy, spite, vindication—rather than tidying them up for comfort.
Robbie, who also produces, has power and volatility to burn. Catherine isn’t a saint or a victim; she’s stubborn, hungry, and often cruel. The role needs someone who can make terrible choices feel tragically human, not cartoonish. Robbie’s recent run has shown the range: the world-conquering commercial instincts of Barbie paired with a taste for risk at LuckyChap. Elordi, fresh off a breakout string of cultural touchstones, brings the right mix of magnetism and menace for Heathcliff—someone you can’t look away from, even when you know he’s about to scorch the earth.
The supporting cast signals the film won’t live on chemistry alone. Hong Chau, an Oscar nominee, adds quiet, cutting precision to everything she does. Shazad Latif has a knack for insolent charm and wounded pride. Alison Oliver, a standout with coiled intensity, seems a natural fit for Brontë country. BAFTA winner Martin Clunes and Ewan Mitchell—whose stare could curdle milk—round out a lineup that suggests real texture across both households.
Visually, the teaser plays with contrast: bodies pressed close, then flung apart by wind and weather; candlelit interiors harshly interrupted by the raw, open moor. You get a sense of a world in which love isn’t safe or soft. It’s a thing that rattles the windows and rearranges the furniture. The editing hints at a circular structure—memories that never quite fade, decisions that echo years later—without giving away plot specifics.
Of course, Wuthering Heights has been adapted many times—William Wyler’s 1939 classic with Merle Oberon and Laurence Olivier, Peter Kosminsky’s 1992 version with Juliette Binoche and Ralph Fiennes, and Andrea Arnold’s 2011 take that pushed the naturalism to the front. Each era picks its poison: grand tragedy, doomed romance, social critique. Fennell appears to be chasing the novel’s original ache: obsession as a weather pattern you can’t predict or escape.
That mirrors what made Brontë’s book so disruptive in the first place. It doesn’t offer a neat moral. Catherine and Heathcliff hurt people, and they hurt each other, and yet the story refuses to dismiss them as monsters. It keeps asking whether love that intense is a form of freedom or another kind of prison. The teaser’s emphasis on desire and consequence suggests Fennell isn’t sanding down those edges for modern taste.
Cast, production, and the Valentine’s weekend gambit
The film is a collaboration between Warner Bros. Pictures, MRC, Lie Still, and LuckyChap Entertainment. Josey McNamara, Emerald Fennell, and Margot Robbie produce, with Sara Desmond and Tom Ackerley serving as executive producers. That team has experience threading the needle between art-house daring and mainstream conversation—exactly what a new Wuthering Heights needs to stand out in a crowded calendar.
Releasing in U.S. theaters on February 13, 2026, and starting internationally on February 11, the strategy is bold. Valentine’s weekend typically belongs to fizzy romances and date-night comedies. Planting a flag with a gothic tragedy flips the script and, frankly, matches the internet’s current mood about “romance” in pop culture: messy, intense, and morally complicated. It’s counterprogramming with teeth.
There’s a commercial logic to it, too. The weekend has become a reliable box-office corridor, and the built-in recognition of Brontë’s title helps. Period dramas also travel well, and the international lead-in suggests confidence that the story’s appeal crosses borders. No festival premiere has been announced yet, but the early September teaser drop keeps the film in conversation through the fall while awards chatter swirls around other titles. It’s a smart, slow-burn rollout.
The teaser doesn’t reveal much about structure, but veterans of the book will be watching for how Fennell handles the generational sweep—whether the story keeps tight focus on the central relationship or opens out to the bitter aftershocks that define the second half of the novel. The danger with Wuthering Heights has always been reducing it to a doomed lovers’ postcard. The promise here is the opposite: a portrait of two people who mistake possession for salvation, then spend years paying for it.
Expect attention on the language. Brontë’s prose is famous for lines that still cut: Catherine insisting she is Heathcliff, that their souls are the same stuff. The snippet we hear in the teaser feels in that spirit—devotion stated so plainly it’s almost frightening. Fennell understands cadence and subtext; dialogue in her previous films doubles as a map to power, class, and desire. If that carries over, we’ll get period speech that’s alive, not embalmed.
There’s also the question of violence—emotional and physical—and how the film frames it. Wuthering Heights is a story full of cruelty: social snubs that feel lethal, petty humiliations, and blunt-force revenge. The teaser suggests a willingness to sit with discomfort without turning suffering into spectacle. That balance matters. The point isn’t to excuse Heathcliff or Catherine, but to show the ecosystem that breeds their worst instincts.
As for fan response, the pairing alone has kicked up a storm. Robbie and Elordi carry huge cultural footprints, and the contrast—her steely control, his brooding volatility—works on paper and on screen. Early chatter zeroes in on the chemistry, the storm-beaten visuals, and the sense that this isn’t a museum piece. It’s alive, a little dangerous, and very aware that love stories don’t have to feel safe to feel true.
For anyone keeping score, this is also another serious swing at classic literature by a filmmaker who likes to provoke. Fennell’s adaptations aren’t about homage; they’re about interrogation. If the teaser is a fair guide, this Wuthering Heights wants to let the characters be as selfish, raw, and contradictory as they are on the page—and to make viewers decide how far their sympathy stretches when passion becomes a wrecking ball.
Wuthering Heights opens internationally on February 11, 2026, and nationwide in the U.S. on February 13, 2026. Expect more footage and a closer look at the full cast’s roles as the campaign ramps up. For now, the message is clear: some love stories bloom in spring; this one thrives in a storm.
September 4 2025 0
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