Emerald Fennell's 'Wuthering Heights' Will Arrive in Theaters in February 2026

Director Emerald Fennell is poised to return to her period drama roots with her next project, an adaptation of the classic Emily Brontë novel Wuthering Heights, and if you think the current film discourse surrounding Christopher Nolan's forthcoming adaptation of The Odyssey is wild, well, it seems safe to assume we haven't seen anything yet.

Fenell is, let's just say, something of a controversial director, whose previous feature films (Promising Young Woman and Saltburn) have sparked no small amount of debate both among critics and the general public. Her established interests in boundary-breaking female characters and class tensions make her a natural fit to tackle this often unhinged story, but her decision to set the release of this film --- which will adapt one of the most famous doomed romances of all time ---- over a Valentine's Day weekend is probably par for the course when it comes to what we ought to expect going forward.

Published by Brontë under the pseudonym Ellis Bell about a year before her death, Wuthering Heights follows the story of the dysfunctional and frequently destructive relationship between two families: The Earnshaws and the Lintons. The relationship between Earnshaw's daughter Catherine and Heathcliff, an orphan the family adopted at a young age, is the emotional linchpin around which the story's larger plot turns, and it's one of the most obsessive, romantic, tragic, and downright toxic love stories in all of literature.