A feverish first look
The first teaser for a new film adaptation of Wuthering Heights dropped on September 3, and the mood is unmistakable: wind, skin, breath, and trouble. Margot Robbie steps into Catherine Earnshaw with a cool, daring charge, while Jacob Elordi brings a flinty, watchful heat to Heathcliff. The footage leans hard into desire and danger, the kind of appetite that has made Emily Brontë’s novel feel radioactive for nearly two centuries. The internet noticed—the teaser was immediately labeled “horny” by fans who saw the stormy moors and the camera’s unapologetic fixation on bodies and glances.
The hook is not just the casting. Charli XCX is writing original songs for the film, and that single choice telegraphs the tone: classical source material cut with modern pop adrenaline. The teaser doesn’t give a full track, but you can sense where this is headed—gothic romance re-framed with contemporary pulse. It’s not an obvious pairing, and that’s the point. Brontë’s story is relentless, messy, and obsessive; Charli’s pop instincts—sharp hooks, club-night drama, and acid-green attitude—could turn that intensity into something immediate for a new audience.
The film is set for a 2026 release, leaving a long runway to build the world around this version. That matters. Period-literary adaptations usually come wrapped in heritage aesthetics. This teaser shrugs off the museum-glass feel. The palette is moody, the cut is tight, and the camera moves like it has a heartbeat. If the finished film keeps this energy, it won’t be asking permission to update Brontë. It’ll just do it.
Robbie and Elordi look like calculated, can’t-miss choices. Robbie’s recent run has involved power and control—characters who know how to command a frame and steer chaos. Catherine needs that. She’s not tidy, not soft, and not “nice.” She’s torn between status and soul, and the teaser hints that Robbie is leaning into Catherine’s contradictions rather than sanding them down. Elordi, meanwhile, has specialized in magnetic, unreadable men—beautiful, brittle, and dangerous when pushed. That lines up with Heathcliff’s volatility, which needs to feel both wounded and feral, never just one or the other.
Charli XCX’s involvement could be the swing factor. She’s fresh off a career-peak couple of years: a widely praised 2024 album built for late nights and loud rooms, plus a string of pop-cultural hits that proved she can make songs that live far beyond their first week. She’s done this in film before—think “Speed Drive” blasting out of Barbie’s blockbuster cycle or the snarling “Hot Girl” built for Bodies Bodies Bodies. Original songs here could mean a proper soundtrack moment, with singles and remixes extending the film’s life on streaming platforms long before and after opening weekend.
If you’re wondering whether pop belongs inside Brontë, there’s precedent. Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet turned Shakespeare into a MTV-era fever dream. Sofia Coppola wired Marie Antoinette with New Order and The Cure to say more about youth, power, and isolation than conventional period music would have. Bridgerton has made string-quartet covers a mainstream TV grammar. When it’s done with intent, the friction between old text and new sound can pull classic themes into the present without dumbing them down.
Reframing a classic for Gen Z and beyond
Quick refresher: Wuthering Heights tracks a love that curdles into obsession and revenge on the Yorkshire moors. Catherine and Heathcliff imprint on each other as children, only to be torn apart by class, cruelty, and terrible choices. The story skips through time, death, and legacy. It’s violent in feeling, often petty in action, and allergic to neat redemption arcs. That’s why it stays interesting—because it refuses to behave.
Adapting it is famously hard. The novel is nested inside a frame narrative and told by unreliable voices. The weather and the land feel like characters. Past versions have taken different routes. William Wyler’s 1939 film enshrined the romance and star power (Merle Oberon and Laurence Olivier) but trimmed the story’s thornier later chapters. The 1992 take with Juliette Binoche and Ralph Fiennes pushed for scope and literary fidelity. Andrea Arnold’s 2011 version stripped it back to mud, wind, and skin, with a raw, naturalistic bite. Tom Hardy and Charlotte Riley’s 2009 TV adaptation leaned into the melodrama, which suits the material more than some critics admit.
This new teaser suggests a bolder collision: period drama with club-night voltage. Costumes and setting read as traditional at first glance, but the rhythm is modern—the cuts are quick, the intimacy is immediate, and the staging favors sensation over propriety. You can feel the film reaching for the rawness that makes the book endure, without pretending these characters are polite or safe. If the music follows through, expect synths and basslines to sit alongside strings and storm soundscapes, underlining the hunger and spite that drive the plot.
Strategy-wise, the package is smart. Pair a global A-list star with a fast-rising leading man, then bring in a pop auteur who knows how to make a moment. That trifecta broadens the audience: literature students and costume-drama loyalists, sure, but also the Charli fanbase and younger viewers who meet classics through soundtracks and TikTok edits long before they pick up the book. The trailer’s fast spread across social platforms shows how quickly that formula can catch.
There’s still a lot we don’t know. The studio hasn’t publicly pinned down a specific release date beyond 2026. No full tracklist yet, no first single, and no word on a festival premiere plan. Those pieces will shape the film’s arc—drop a lead single early and you build a summer-to-fall campaign; hold it until closer to release and you aim for impact stacking. Expect more material in stages: a longer trailer, then character pieces, then music teases that double as viral assets.
The bigger question is tone management. Wuthering Heights can overdose on gloom or, worse, sand itself down into a safe costume romance. The teaser’s “desire first” stance is a bet that the story’s uglier truths—jealousy, class resentment, cruelty—will hit harder when the attraction feels undeniable. That can work if the film makes space for the aftermath: the pettiness, the punishment, the way obsession freezes lives in place.
This sits neatly in a broader trend: prestige projects that use stylish, sensual framing to argue for the relevance of old stories. Autumn de Wilde’s Emma played with candy-colored precision. Netflix’s Persuasion tried to modernize Austen’s voice directly (results mixed). Even outside period pieces, films like Saltburn and shows like The Great test how much heat and humor audiences will accept inside traditionally “serious” genres. The lesson is simple: if you want younger viewers to care, meet them where they already live culturally—music first, image forward, feelings at full volume.
Three things to watch from here:
- The music rollout. Does Charli lead with a club banger, a bruised ballad, or something in between? The first single will tell you how the film wants to be felt.
- How rough the film lets Heathcliff and Catherine get. Sanitizing them would be the safest choice—and the wrong one.
- Whether marketing leans into controversy. Wuthering Heights inspires fierce takes. The campaign can harness that energy instead of dodging it.
For now, the teaser does its job: it stakes out a point of view. This is not an antique under glass. It wants you to feel the wind and the want, to see the dirt under the fingernails, and to hear a modern pop heartbeat inside a famously haunted story. That’s a risky mix. It’s also exactly the kind of risk that can turn a classic back into a live wire.
