Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights | Warner Bros beats Netflix to rights

Emerald Fennell
Share this Article:

Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights movie heads to Warner Bros, with its producers having turned down a higher bid from Netflix…


The world of studio filmmaking can be an ethical minefield, often making it difficult to root for a particular studio when it indulges in sketchy practices that are at best, damaging to cinema (such as deleting movies). Still, we find ourselves cheering at the news that Warner Bros has acquired the rights to Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights.

Why? Because Warner has committed to giving the film a proper cinema release with the kind of huge marketing spend that a film like this could really use. It’s a non-franchise project with two proper movie stars looking to create a new take on Emily Bronté’s 1847 gothic romance.

Perhaps the folks we should really be cheering here are the film’s producers.

According to Deadline, Fennell, Margot Robbie and the project’s other producers turned down a reported offer of $150m from Netflix, because the Silicon Valley streamer wouldn’t offer the film a theatrical release. Amazon was reportedly also in the hunt but that studio has also suffered its own claims of not following through with promises of theatrical release promises of late, and as such, the team behind Wuthering Heights are believed to have taken around half of that sum to sign with Warner Bros.

Read more: Wuthering Heights | Margot Robbie, Jacob Elordi to star in Emerald Fennell’s Saltburn follow-up

Still, this deal could yet work out to their advantage on a financial level, as well as an artistic one. The report also states that part of the Warner Bros deal includes a handsome backend profit participation clause, meaning that if the film is a commercial hit, the creators could find themselves making far more than that intial $75m.

Given that we’ve lately seen Greta Gerwig reportedly regretting her decision to sign up with Netflix to make two Narnia films, for the reasons outlined above, the success of Wuthering Heights could become something of a beacon for other filmmakers faced with the same quandary. We recently saw reports of Knives Out star Daniel Craig lashing out at Netflix boss Ted Sarandos about the company’s refusal to entertain theatrical releases.

Should Wuthering Heights catch the imagination of the cinema-going public as Fennell’s previous film Saltburn did, perhaps fillmmakers will think twice in the future about whether a deal with Netflix really is the best way forward.

Share this Article:

Related Stories

More like this