People are, as the disgraced Drake once said, in their feelings about Emerald Fennell’s upcoming adaptation of “Wuthering Heights.” To be fair, I understand why. Fennell, who could most politely be described as a “divisive” director, is an interesting choice to helm a take on Emily Brontë’s only novel. As Tina Fey famously and correctly stated on the “Las Culturistas” podcast about the Oscar winner’s body of work and overall vibe, “What are you going to do when Emerald Fennell calls you about her next project, where you play Carey Mulligan’s co-worker in the bridal section of Harrods and then Act 3 takes a sexually violent turn and you have to pretend to be surprised by that turn?” Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi are set to play windswept and doomed lovers Catherine and Heathcliff, despite Robbie being nearly a full decade older than Elordi (and Heathcliff not being white), and in general, fans of Brontë are speaking out.

In the YouTube comments underneath the movie’s trailer, @Raul-j6t took umbrage with the film’s tagline, writing, “‘The greatest love story of all time’ I don’t think we’ve read the same book.” Someone else, user @me-sunnyg, quipped, “If you listen really closely, at the end you can hear Emily [Brontë] screaming from beyond the grave.” These are, frankly, funny takes on Fennell’s upcoming movie, and I understand; anyone who’s really attached to the novel is going to have issues with a clearly anachronistic and offbeat adaptation. (The original Charli XCX soundtrack definitely isn’t helping either.) Personally, I think people are right to be concerned about this movie, but I also think there’s something else at play here … which is that people are getting into the habit of passing judgment on movies way before they even release. 

If you’re not a big Emily Brontë-head and haven’t revisited “Wuthering Heights” since you read it in 11th-grade AP English, let me refresh your memory. The novel, which Brontë published under a male pen name (Ellis Bell, to be specific), is widely considered to be one of the best literary works in the English canon, and it’s also unrelentingly dark. (Check trigger warnings before you read it, is all I’ll say to that effect.) Through the eyes of a housekeeper named Ellen “Nelly” Dean, who will be played by Oscar nominee Hong Chau in Emerald Fennell’s movie, we learn about Margot Robbie’s wealthy and highborn Catherine Earnshaw and her torrid and troubled love affair with Jacob Elordi’s famously brooding Heathcliff, an orphan taken in by Catherine’s father. Though Catherine’s father loves Heathcliff and treats him like family, after his death, Catherine’s cruel brother essentially discards the young man and is even violent with him, leading Catherine to take care of Heathcliff by showing him affection.

“Wuthering Heights” takes place across many years and is a difficult, fraught, and even disturbing book about domestic abuse, generational trauma, the impossible Victorian class system, and a whole host of other issues that were distinctly of their time but are still relevant today. My point here is that Fennell is a truly crazy choice to direct “Wuthering Heights” based on her first two movies, “Promising Young Woman” and “Saltburn,” the former of which I’d argue works much better than the latter — but she’s still a super-heightened, stylistically strange, and often unfocused director for such a harrowing tale. Still, I also think we need to reserve judgment, because the movie isn’t out yet, and that issue is becoming its own problem.

Anecdotally, I saw social media chatter about stills released from Christopher Nolan’s upcoming adaptation of “The Odyssey,” and amidst that chatter, I saw people saying the stills — which, it should go without saying, were quite likely staged and taken for press purposes and are not stills from the actual finished film as far as anybody knows — looked like “cheap” takes on prestige television and thus, the whole movie looks bad. This, frankly, is so ludicrous.

“Wuthering Heights” could absolutely be a disaster and feature that “sexually violent turn” that makes the entire movie sort of absurd, especially because the back half of this story has a bunch of ghosts in it. (Fennell could always do what the “MacGruber” movie did if she really wants to make headlines, but I digress.) Still, I am begging moviegoers to stop making assumptions about films that nobody has seen yet and then proclaiming those assumptions like self-appointed town criers. We really need to let the films speak for themselves, and on February 13, 2026, in the United States — just in time for Valentine’s Day — Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights” will get the chance to stand on its own two feet and earn scorn, acclaim, or some perverse mixture of the two. For now, let’s give the movie a chance to prove itself … and if it’s a dud, I’ll meet you right back here to dunk on it next year.

Again, “Wuthering Heights” hits U.S. theaters on February 13, 2026.