Inside the Controversial Ending of Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi’s ‘Wuthering Heights’

2026 ‘Wuthering Heights’ Movie Starring ‘Barbie’ Actress Margot Robbie and the star of “Frankenstein” Jacob Elordi deviates significantly from Emily Brontë’s 1847 novel. 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.

Margot Robbie and Jacob Elrodi star in 2026 adaptation of ‘Wuthering Heights’

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 welcomes Heathcliff as a mysterious orphan. The two grow up together and develop deep feelings for each other.

However, Cathy decides to marry her wealthy neighbor, Edgar Linton (Shazad Latif), prompting Heathcliff to leave. He later returns as 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.

How does the Margot Robbie version end?

Many fans know that Cathy dies about halfway through the book and Heathcliff ends up driving himself crazy. In the book, Heathcliff secretly visits a pregnant Catherine, and she dies shortly after giving birth to a daughter, Cathy.

In the film, Cathy’s housekeeper, Nelly, plays a more villainous role. Cathy tells Nelly that she had a miscarriage, but Nelly thinks she is lying for attention. Nelly also burned Heathcliff’s letters to Cathy to separate them. However, once Nelly realizes that Cathy is dying, she tells Heathcliff. Unfortunately, it is too late and Cathy dies of sepsis following a miscarriage before his arrival.

How the ending of ‘Wuthering Heights’ changed

In the book, Cathy has a daughter, but in the movie she has a miscarriage. This is just a change from the source material. The other change is that Heathcliff visits Cathy before she dies; however, in the film this does not happen. She speaks to him in a dream state, but they do not meet in person until after his death. Fennell explained that the decision to keep Heathcliff and Cathy separated at the end is “partly structural.”

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

She went on to say, “And so what I did was I put forward a lot of love and a lot of these really important conversations, to give them a little bit of time so that it doesn’t happen at the end.”

Why the 2026 adaptation ends with Cathy’s death

Instead of following their children’s story, the film ends rather quickly after Cathy’s death. His return as a ghost, featured in several other adaptations, does not take place here.

“It starts where it ends and ends where it begins,” Fennell said of the ending she chose. “And that’s the thing about love, and that’s the thing about the book, right? It’s that it’s eternal and it’s cyclical, and so there’s no stopping – even when there’s a terrible, sad, tragic ending, it’s not really a stopping – because that’s what the book feels so much about.”

She adds, “It’s about the depth of human feeling and how it exists in a deep way, not just physical. And so, I don’t know, it seemed like the right way to end it.”

Emerald Fennell defends her edits in ‘Wuthering Heights’

Elsewhere in his conversation with Weekly EntertainmentFennell revealed that she first fell in love with the book when she was a teenager. When creating the storyline, she remembered events that 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 I remembered were both real and not real,” she explained. “So there was some wish fulfillment in there, and there were whole characters that I had sort of forgotten or consolidated.”

Instead of directly adapting the book, Fennell explained that she “wanted to do something that was my response and interpretation to this book and how it felt.”