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 significant departure from the 1847 novel by Emily Brontë. There have been countless adaptations over the years, but this version, written and directed by Emerald Fennell, of “Saltburn” fame, ends differently from the book on which it is based.

“Wuthering Heights” is a complex 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 are children when Cathy’s father takes in Heathcliff as a mysterious orphan. The two grow up together and develop deep feelings for one another.

However, Cathy decides to marry her wealthy neighbor, Edgar Linton (Shazad Latif), which prompts Heathcliff to leave. He later returns a wealthy man and marries Edgar’s sister, Isabella Linton. That said, even though they are both married, their romantic feelings for each other do not diminish.

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

In 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 keep them apart. However, 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.

In the book, Cathy has a daughter, but in the movie, she suffers a miscarriage. That is only one change from the source material. The other change is that Heathcliff visits Cathy before she dies; however, in the movie, that does not happen. She speaks to him in a dream-state, but they don’t actually meet in person before she dies. Fennell explained that the decision to keep Heathcliff and Cathy apart at the end is "partly structural.”

"There are about three different meetings and three different speeches, and so part of it was consolidating that," she said while speaking to Entertainment Weekly. "But also, we talk a lot about ‘Romeo and Juliet’ and, obviously, when we meet Isabella, she's talking about that kind of story and about that missed thing, and I feel so much that Cathy and Heathcliff's [romance] was about missing each other.”

She went on to say, “And so what I did was I brought a lot of the love forward, and a lot of those really important conversations forward, to give them some time so that it didn't just happen at the end."

Instead 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, does not occur here.

"It begins where it ends and ends where it begins," Fennell said of her chosen ending. "And that's the thing about love, and it's the thing about the book, right? It's that it's forever and it's cyclical, and so there's no stop — even when there's a terrible, sad, tragic stop, it's not really a stop — because that's what the book feels so much about."

She adds, "It's about the depths of human feeling and how it exists in a profound way, not just a physical one. And so that, I don't know, that felt like the right way 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 teenager. While creating the script, she recalled events that had actually happened in 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 know, I think the things that I remembered were both real and not real," she explained. "So there was a certain amount of wish fulfillment in there, and there were whole characters that I'd sort of forgotten or consolidated."

Instead of directly adapting the book, Fennell explained that she “wanted to make something that was my response and interpretation to that book and to the feeling of it.”