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2026’s Wildly Divisive Gothic Romance Is Officially Streaming on HBO Max

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There are literary adaptations, and then there are literary adaptations that kick the door open, track mud across the floor, and dare everyone to complain about the furniture. This one has already done plenty of that. It arrived with a major cast, a famous source text, a filmmaker with a taste for provocation, and enough feverish gothic energy to make every foggy moor look like it needs a chaperone. Now, after becoming one of the year’s more divisive releases, it has officially made its way to streaming.

Wuthering Heights is now streaming on HBO Max, bringing Emerald Fennell’s take on Emily Brontë’s classic novel to a much wider audience. The film adapts the first half of Brontë’s 1847 story and leans wildly into obsession, jealousy, class, desire, and all the extremely healthy relationship choices that have kept this story alive for nearly two centuries. The cast includes Margot Robbie (Barbie; I, Tonya) as Cathy Earnshaw, Jacob Elordi (Frankenstein, Priscilla) as Heathcliff, Hong Chau (The Whale, The Menu) as Nelly, Shazad Latif (Star Trek: Discovery, The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel) as Edgar, and Alison Oliver (Saltburn, Conversations With Friends) as Isabella.













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Collider Exclusive · Oscar Best Picture Quiz
Which Oscar Best Picture
Is Your Perfect Movie?

Parasite · Everything Everywhere · Oppenheimer · Birdman · No Country
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Five Oscar Best Picture winners. Five completely different visions of what cinema can be — and what it can do to you. One of them is the film that was made for the way your mind works. Ten questions will figure out which one.

🪜Parasite

🌀Everything Everywhere

☢️Oppenheimer

🐦Birdman

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🪙No Country for Old Men

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01

What kind of film experience do you actually want?
The best movies don’t just entertain — they leave something behind.





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02

Which idea grabs you most in a film?
Great films are driven by a central obsession. What’s yours?





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03

How do you like your story told?
Form is content. The way a story is shaped changes what it means.





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04

What makes a truly great antagonist?
The opposition defines the protagonist. What kind of opposition fascinates you?





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05

What do you want from a film’s ending?
The final note is the one that lingers. What do you want it to sound like?





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06

Which setting pulls you in most?
Where a film takes place shapes everything — mood, stakes, what’s even possible.





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07

What cinematic craft impresses you most?
Every great film has a signature — a technical or artistic element that makes it unmistakable.





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08

What kind of main character do you root for?
The protagonist is the lens. Who you choose to follow says something about you.





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09

How do you feel about a film that takes its time?
Pace is a choice. Some films sprint; others let tension accumulate slowly, deliberately.





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10

What do you want to feel walking out of the cinema?
The best films leave a mark. What kind of mark do you want?





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The Academy Has Decided
Your Perfect Film Is…

Your answers have pointed to one Oscar Best Picture winner above all others. This is the film that was made for the way your mind works.

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Parasite

You are drawn to films that operate on multiple levels simultaneously — that begin in one genre and quietly, brilliantly migrate into another. Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite is a film about class, desire, and the architecture of inequality that manages to be darkly funny, deeply suspenseful, and genuinely shocking across a single extraordinary running time. Your instinct is for cinema that hides its true intentions until the moment it’s ready to reveal them. Parasite is exactly that — a film that rewards close attention and punishes assumptions, right up to its devastating final image.

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Everything Everywhere All at Once

You want it all — and this film gives you all of it. The Daniels’ Everything Everywhere All at Once is one of the most maximalist films ever made: action comedy, multiverse sci-fi, family drama, existential crisis, and a genuinely earned emotional core that sneaks up on you amid the chaos. You are someone who responds to ambition, who doesn’t want cinema to choose between being entertaining and being meaningful. This film refuses that choice entirely. It is overwhelming by design, and its overwhelming nature is precisely the point — because the feeling of being crushed by infinite possibility is exactly what it’s about.

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Oppenheimer

You are drawn to cinema on a grand scale — films that understand history not as a backdrop but as a force, and that place their characters inside that force and watch what happens. Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer is a film about the terrifying gap between what we can do and what we should do, told with the full weight of one of the most consequential moments in human history behind it. You want your films to feel important without feeling self-important — to earn their ambition through sheer craft and the gravity of their subject. Oppenheimer does exactly that. It is enormous, complicated, and refuses easy comfort.

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Birdman

You are drawn to films that foreground their own construction — that make the how of the filmmaking part of the what it’s about. Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Birdman, shot to appear as a single continuous take, is cinema examining itself through the cracked mirror of a fading actor’s ego. You respond to formal daring, to the feeling that a film is doing something that probably shouldn’t be possible. Michael Keaton’s performance and Emmanuel Lubezki’s restless camera create something genuinely unlike anything else — a film that is simultaneously about creativity, relevance, self-destruction, and the impossibility of ever truly knowing if your work means anything at all.

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No Country for Old Men

You are drawn to cinema that trusts silence, that refuses to explain itself, and that treats dread as a form of meaning. The Coen Brothers’ No Country for Old Men is a film about the arrival of a new kind of evil — implacable, arbitrary, and utterly indifferent to the moral frameworks we use to make sense of the world. It is one of the most formally controlled films ever made, and its controlled restraint is what makes it so terrifying. You want your films to haunt you, not comfort you. You are not interested in resolution if resolution would be dishonest. No Country for Old Men is honest in a way that most cinema never dares to be.

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Was ‘Wuthering Heights’ Successful?

The movie grossed around $240 million at the worldwide box office, against a reported budget of $80 million. It currently has a split reception, with Rotten Tomatoes scores reflecting a divide between critics and audiences. The critics’ consensus reads, “Liberally adapting Emily Brontë’s classic story with a heavy dose of carnality and chic stylization, Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights might not be the stuff of high literature, but it is a visually vibrant pleasure.

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Collider’s review stated that Wuthering Heights is less an adaptation of the novel and more a glossy, deeply misguided rewrite that strips away almost everything that makes the original story powerful. The review argues that Fennell guts the book’s core by removing major characters, flattening the generational trauma, and turning a brutal Gothic revenge story into a shallow, over-romanticized fantasy. While the film is undeniably stylish and visually striking, the review makes clear that all that beauty cannot cover up how hollow it feels. In the end, it sees Wuthering Heights as a soulless, insulting adaptation that completely misses the point of the novel.

Wuthering Heights is now streaming on HBO Max


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Release Date

February 13, 2026

Runtime

136 Minutes

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Director

Emerald Fennell

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Writers

Emerald Fennell, Emily Brontë

Producers
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Margot Robbie, Tom Ackerley, Emerald Fennell, Josey McNamara

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