Wuthering Heights set to ravish Valentine’s weekend box office

Early projections suggest Emerald Fennell’s adaptation could recoup its $80m production budget in its opening three days – with strong US and overseas takings expected

The titillating trailers and method-dressed promotional tour appear to have paid off: early indications are that Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights will earn back its $80m (£59m) production budget on the first weekend of release.

Projections estimate the three-day frame, which falls on Valentine’s weekend, should recoup around $50m (£37m) at the US box office – where it opens across 3,600 screens – and a further $40m (£29m) overseas.

Competition for the top spots in the charts is soft, with studios making way for the mammoth love story. Judicious counter-programming comes courtesy of children’s animation GOAT and murky drama Crime 101.

Wuthering Heights continues studio Warner Bros’ impressive streak at the box office, following a 2025 slate that included A Minecraft Movie, Final Destination Bloodlines and Weapons. The studio, which is now fielding takeover bids from Netflix and Paramount, also boasts the two key contenders at this year’s Oscars: Sinners and One Battle After Another.

Sinners broke the record for Academy Award nominations, with 16, while its rival remains favourite to take the best picture and director prizes. Both films have also proved lucrative, despite their considerable budgets: Ryan Coogler’s supernatural thriller is now on $369m (£270m), while Paul Thomas Anderson’s countercultural comedy has taken $208m (£152m).

Wuthering Heights is Fennell’s third film as writer-director, following 2020’s Promising Young Woman, starring Carey Mulligan as a woman who takes revenge on the men who assaulted her friend, and Saltburn (2023), a provocative spin on Brideshead Revisited, starring Barry Keoghan as an Oxford student who becomes obsessed with a much wealthier fellow student, played by Jacob Elordi.

Promising Young Woman won Fennell the original screenplay Oscar, while Saltburn became a watercooler hit for streamer Amazon. Wuthering Heights reunites her with Elordi (as Heathcliff) as well as Saltburn producer Margot Robbie, who plays Catherine in the new film.

Fennell has stressed that the adaptation, which takes considerable liberties with Emily Brontë’s source novel, is a personal interpretation of the book, inspired by her feelings about it when she first encountered it as a teenager.

Reviews have been mixed, with many US pundits praising its ambition and idiosyncrasies, while UK critics have in the main been more sceptical.

In his two-star review, the Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw called it “a 20-page fashion shoot of relentless silliness, with bodices ripped to shreds and a saucy slap of BDSM”.

Disquiet has already been voiced over the film’s intentional anachronisms, as well as the casting of Robbie and Elordi, both of whom are considerably older than the characters in the novel. Elordi’s casting met with further backlash as Heathcliff is most commonly described by Brontë as “dark-skinned”.