Inside Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi’s ‘Wuthering Heights’ Controversial Ending

The 2026 “Wuthering Heights” movie starring “Barbie” actress Margot Robbie and “Frankenstein” star Jacob Elordi takes a major departure from the 1847 novel by Emily Brontë. There have been countless adaptations through the years, but this version, written and directed by Emerald Fennell, of “Saltburn” fame, ends in another way from the book on which it is predicated.

“Wuthering Heights” is a posh Gothic tale that focuses on themes of obsessive love and revenge. The story focuses on the obsessive love affair between Catherine “Cathy” Earnshaw (Margot Robbie) and Heathcliff (Jacob Elordi). They’re children when Cathy’s father takes in Heathcliff as a mysterious orphan. The 2 grow up together and develop deep feelings for each other.

Nevertheless, Cathy decides to marry her wealthy neighbor, Edgar Linton (Shazad Latif), which prompts Heathcliff to depart. He later returns a wealthy man and marries Edgar’s sister, Isabella Linton. That said, despite the fact that they’re each married, their romantic feelings for one another don’t diminish.

Many fans know that Cathy actually dies about halfway through the book, and Heathcliff eventually drives himself mad. Within the book, Heathcliff visits a pregnant Catherine in secret, and she or he dies shortly after giving birth to a daughter, Cathy.

Within the movie, Cathy’s housekeeper, Nelly, plays a more villainous role. Cathy tells Nelly that she has had a miscarriage, but Nelly thinks she is lying for attention. Nelly has also been burning Heathcliff’s letters to Cathy to maintain them apart. Nevertheless, once Nelly realizes Cathy is dying, she tells Heathcliff. Unfortunately, it’s too late, and Cathy dies from sepsis from the miscarriage before he arrives.

Within the book, Cathy has a daughter, but within the movie, she suffers a miscarriage. That is simply one change from the source material. The opposite change is that Heathcliff visits Cathy before she dies; nonetheless, within the movie, that doesn’t occur. She speaks to him in a dream-state, but they don’t actually meet in person before she dies. Fennell explained that the choice to maintain Heathcliff and Cathy apart at the tip is “partly structural.”

“There are about three different meetings and three different speeches, and so a part of it was consolidating that,” she said while talking to Entertainment Weekly. “But additionally, we talk so much about ‘Romeo and Juliet’ and, obviously, after we meet Isabella, she’s talking about that sort of story and about that missed thing, and I feel a lot that Cathy and Heathcliff’s [romance] was about missing one another.”

She went on to say, “And so what I did was I brought numerous the love forward, and numerous those really vital conversations forward, to offer them a while in order that it didn’t just occur at the tip.”

As an alternative of following the story of their children, the movie ends pretty quickly after Cathy passes away. Her return as a ghost, featured in several other adaptations, doesn’t occur here.

“It begins where it ends and ends where it begins,” Fennell said of her chosen ending. “And that is the thing about love, and it is the thing concerning the book, right? It’s that it’s eternally and it’s cyclical, and so there isn’t any stop — even when there is a terrible, sad, tragic stop, it’s not likely a stop — because that is what the book feels a lot about.”

She adds, “It’s concerning the depths of human feeling and the way it exists in a profound way, not only a physical one. And in order that, I do not know, that felt like the fitting approach to end it for me.”

Elsewhere in her conversation with Entertainment Weekly, Fennell revealed that she had first fallen in love with the book as a youngster. While creating the script, she recalled events that had actually happened within the book and others that didn’t. This led her to shape the narrative by eliminating some characters and changing others.

“It was funny, you recognize, I believe the things that I remembered were each real and never real,” she explained. “So there was a specific amount of wish achievement in there, and there have been whole characters that I’d kind of forgotten or consolidated.”

As an alternative of directly adapting the book, Fennell explained that she “desired to make something that was my response and interpretation to that book and to the sensation of it.”