Wuthering Heights tops the Valentine’s Day weekend box office | Film industry

The exciting trailers and elaborate promotional tour appear to have paid off: early indications are that Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights will make back its $80m (£59m) production budget in its first weekend of release.

Forecasts estimate that the three-day window, which falls on Valentine’s Day weekend, would earn 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 quiet, as studios make room for the mega-love story. Wise counter-programming comes courtesy of the kids’ cartoon GOAT and the mystery drama Crime 101.

Wuthering Heights continues Warner Bros.’ impressive streak at the box office, following a 2025 slate that included Minecraft, Final Destination Bloodlines and weapons. The studio, which is now receiving takeover offers from Netflix and Paramount, boasts the main contenders at this year’s Oscars: Sinners and One Battle After Another.

The film Sinners broke the record for Oscar nominations with 16 nominations, while its competitor remains the most likely candidate to win the Best Picture and Director awards. Both films have also proven to be profitable, despite their big budgets: Ryan Coogler’s supernatural thriller now stands at $369m (£270m), while Paul Thomas Anderson’s countercultural comedy has grossed $208m (£152m).

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

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

Fennell has emphasized that the adaptation, which takes significant 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 were mixed, with many American critics praising its ambition and idiosyncrasies, while UK critics were mainly more skeptical.

In his two-star review, Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian described it as “a 20-page fashion shoot of relentless silliness, with bras ripped to shreds and a smack of raunchy BDSM”.

Concern has already been expressed about the film’s deliberate anachronisms, as well as the casting of Ruby and Elordi, both of whom are much older than the characters in the novel. Elordi’s casting was met with more backlash with Brontë mostly describing Heathcliff as “dark-skinned”.