Moor, Please! I Can’t Get Enough of the “Wuthering Heights” Hype
The TCL Chinese Theatre traded palm trees for foggy moors last month as Emerald Fennell unveiled her cinematic adaptation of Wuthering Heights to the world. Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi’s arrival on Hollywood Boulevard marked the peak of a carefully orchestrated campaign that has positioned Brontë’s tortured romance not as a literary relic, but as a flashy cultural moment. And I, for one, am fully seated.
I was in from the moment a still of Margot Robbie as Cathy hit my Instagram feed. What followed felt less like a standard press rollout and more like a brilliantly choreographed cultural takeover. Stylist Andrew Mukamal dressing up the press tour like gothic fashion week. Charli XCX soundtracked romantic despair. Jacob Elordi quietly turned a brooding 19th-century antihero into major thirst content. The moors migrated from the pages of English literature into group chats, TikTok edits, and the pages of Vogue. At some point, Wuthering Heights revealed itself as something closer to a cultural event than a typical movie release. And with that came the discourse.
If there’s one thing we know about Emerald Fennell, it’s that she doesn’t shy away from being provocative. Her films lean into spectacle, excess, sexuality, and immaculate styling. They are engineered for conversation without sacrificing intention. Her previous film Saltburn arrived dripping in aristocratic excess and knew exactly how to get people talking (let’s be real: the bathtub scene had us all talking). It invited think pieces, TikTok dissections, and arguments about privilege dressed up as pleasure. If Saltburn was aristocratic eroticism, Wuthering Heights looks ready to dress heartbreak in Victorian gowns, and soundtrack it for the club.
Naturally, the internet is doing what it does best: spiraling. Beyond the expected debates about difelity to the novel, TikTok has already popularized pre-released songs from XCX’s album, turning Robbie’s wind-whipped stares and moody landscapes into edits. Meanwhile, Jacob Elordi’s casting as Heathcliff has sparked criticism, with critics pointing out the story’s racial undertones and questioning the casting of a white actor in a role long imagined as a "dark-skinned gypsy", as written in the novel. The debates unfold alongside memes, aesthetic breakdowns, and outfit recaps, creating a strange ecosystem where gothic romance, internet humor, and social commentary collide. By the time the film actually hits theaters, much of the story has already lived several lives online.
What’s striking about the Wuthering Heights rollout is how it has turned cinema into something almost archival before it’s experiential. Long before opening night, the film has already been filtered through edits, fan discourse, and an array of aesthetic mood boards, its emotional beats distilled into thirty-second clips set to Charli XCX and Kate Bush tracks, its controversies pre-litigated in virtual comment sections. Jacob Elordi’s Heathcliff exists simultaneously as a casting headline, meme template, and cultural flashpoint, while Emily Brontë’s original text becomes raw material for the internet’s reinterpretation. Movies, now, are basically pre-consumed before they are screened; consumed and debated before anyone even buys a ticket. By the time audiences finally sit down in a theater, they’re not encountering the film fresh in itss original, raw form. Instead, they’re stepping into something that’s already been narrated, remixed, and emotionally preloaded by online discourse and algorithms.
I’m by no means expecting the film to preserve Brontë’s rawness or transform it into highbrow, luxury content, but watching it unfold in real time has been completely addictive. Now I just want to sit in the theater and see it all come alive on screen: the stormy visuals, boundary-pushing style, and, of course, the magnetic essence of Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi.
